Vol. II No. 7

There was a time in Smart Bar of Club Metro in Chicago when the speaker system consisted of rows of identical cone-type drivers mounted in narrow cabinets – like 8-foot-long flower boxes – on the ceiling. This system had both of the advantages I attribute to Bose 901’s and Audience-brand speakers.

I went into the club at some later time and this system had been replaced by enormous cabinets sitting on the floor of about 4’x3’x3’ dimensions. The sound was terrible. It was screechy and muddy and noisy – how to describe it? Well, I think those speakers were of the “folded horn” type – and that’s what they sounded like. Because a horn type speaker has tons of sound straining to come out of a few really small elements, which then echoes and bounces around within the massive inert horn itself, the sound is, like, ringing with its own incoherence. But unlike the ringing of a bell, the ringing of folded horns driven loudly is like a screeching quality.

I used to enjoy the many dance songs in the early- and mid-eighties which featured male vocals with British accents. At many clubs you would have thought there was a “British Empire” consisting of the popularity and appeal of dance music from the U.K.

What I have noticed – what seems to me to be the case – is that the same British-accented vocals that sound so dramatic and compelling in all-analog reproduction sound effete and ineffectual and homosexual in digitalized versions.

Somehow a vintage copy of the 2-album version of English Settlement by XTC got into my family’s collection. Those first three songs of Side 1 are terrific – like a force of nature.