Following its release in the early 1980s, the audio compact disc was widely embraced by consumers and record companies in the United States and around the world. But within the audiophile community, many reacted negatively to both the sound of the new medium, and its technical inaccessibility compared with vinyl record turntables. In this article, I trace responses to the CD in the audiophile community through interviews, reviews, and editorials published in enthusiast magazines. I argue that the CD represented both aesthetic and cultural challenges to audiophiles, and that critiques of the medium inspired a variety of technical innovations from small high-end audio firms that both improved the sound from CDs, and enabled better integration with the small-scale system building practices that lay at their core of the audiophile hobby.

'Perfect Sound Forever' - Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Remaking of Compact Disc Playback

This article proposes the concept of “nationalness” to account for the persistent circulation of national labels as a tool of distinction. We argue that the concept expands on the traditional conception of nation as country of origin to include cultural notions of sensuous and aesthetic qualities that are semiotically tied to national “essence.” Nationalness connects products to nations not only through indexicality but also iconicity. It is made possible through “rhematization,” the process of appropriating signs whose interpretants are taken to be iconic. Talk of nationalness enables consumers to make sense of national labels in today’s world where the both ends of capitalism—manufacturing and consumption—are thoroughly global. Instead of confining our analytical focus to top-down national branding projects, we examine how consumers invoke the idea of a nation to describe their uses of industrial products. Our case study is the popular concept of “British sound” circulated among audiophiles. Dra...

“That British Sound”: Talk of Nationalness in Global Capitalism

The year following the 1952 publication of Invisible Man, at the presentation ceremony for the National Book Award he had just won, Ralph Ellison told his audience that if he were asked in all seriousness what he considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, he would reply, first, ‘‘its experimental attitude,’’ and, second, ‘‘its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth century fiction.’’ 1 That his first novel had won such an award he acknowledged as a clear sign of crisis in the American novel, a sense of crisis that he and the other ‘‘younger novelists’’ of the time shared. On the aesthetic level, Ellison’s experimental novel had developed out of his own reaction to a growing uncertainty about the formal possibilities of the novel—an uncertainty that led him to reject both the forms of the ‘‘tight, well-made Jamesian novel’’ and the ‘‘hard-boiled novel’’ of Hemingway, which had been a center of literary revolt among apprentice writers of the 1930s.2 The narrative experiment that Ellison created to fill the void

"Jack-the-Bear" Dreaming: Ellison's Spiritual Technologies

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/technology_and_culture/v051/51.2.downes.pdf

"Perfect Sound Forever": Innovation, Aesthetics, and the Re-making of Compact Disc Playback

/pdf/listening-spaces-audiophiles-technology-and-domestic-music-ot0tuvgnr1.pdf

Listening Spaces: Audiophiles, Technology and Domestic Music Listening

Expanded and revised to cover recent developments, this text should tell you what you need to know to become a better listener and buyer of quality high-fidelity components. New sections include: super audio CD; high-resolution audio on DVD; and single-ended amplifiers.

Robert Harley

Papers

The Complete Guide to High-End Audio