My Audiophile Journey

I began my audiophile journey back in 2007, though I was listening to music from much earlier. Growing up in the late seventies and eighties, there were some elder brothers who opened up this magical world of music listening.

Early Days in Kalimpong

Back in Ruth Villa, I remember Robin daju, who had a drawer full of cassettes. He had Deep Purple, Smokie, Jimi Hendrix, Boney M, ABBA—as eclectic a collection as anyone could have in 8th Mile Kalimpong in the early eighties. Unfortunately, the playback was through a very small Sanyo cassette player which killed the music by being muddy and anemic. No amount of cleaning the tape head with alcohol could rectify that.

When Robin daju wanted to learn songs and guitar riffs to play them by ear, the riffs came out alright in his music, but the words were challenging. There's a Smokie song called "No More Letters." The opening line remained indecipherable for the better part of three decades. Somehow I never got around to checking the lyrics on the internet. It was only when I listened to it closely on my iPhone that I understood Chris Norman sang, "Gotta rubber stamp on my jumbo"… and that later refrain went "got to get, I got to get, I got to get away." Back then it could have been anything. Also, the closing line of Boney M's "Rasputin"—I finally understand it wasn't "Orange Squash" (that was via Robin daju's ear), it was "Oh Those Russians."

Mount Hermon and The Grateful Dead

Later in Mount Hermon School, my classmate Vivek introduced me to The Grateful Dead, and I've been a deadhead, a tapehead, and now a nethead ever since.

In the late eighties and early nineties, Darjeeling was awash with Michael and Peacock cassettes. I was living at Municipal Building N for about a year, and there were people like Ratan daju, who said he used to take care of logistics for The Forbidden Fruit. There were contemporary folks who sang or played guitar for bands such as Mountain Wind, Damage Brain, and Magnum Opus.

Forbidden Fruit had a cassette called The First Bite with songs like "Mr Polythene Man." The cover came with the caveat: "Home Taping Is Killing Music"—which it did. I cannot recall in great detail the songs they had in this album, but I remember the music to be rock-inflected but quite progressive too, with the use of synthesizers.

Palden Daju and Local Legends

A few years later, Palden daju, who played lead guitar for Magnum Opus, collaborated with Kana Pasang to tape some songs—just vocals and guitar. They did the Allman Brothers' "Ramblin' Man," "Peaceful Easy Feeling" by the Eagles, and Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight." The guitar was at the top of its game. Palden daju could easily be the best guitarist of Darjeeling for his time. He played standing still, almost awkwardly without much showmanship, but with impeccable timing and clarity. Pasang's voice was low register and full-throated with a subtle hint of Tibetan. But to his credit, he sang all these songs as Pasang the vocalist, and not like Clapton or Glen Frey. That tape was good music of those times.

Pasang daju had two friends, Kinga and Lokesh. As per Ratan daju, that group of buddies comprised the best guitarist, the best breakdancer, and the best footballer of Darjeeling. Kinga was the breakdancer and Lokesh daju, who I think played for Dynamo, was the footballer. Later he was the games teacher at St. George Pedong. I don't know what happened to Kinga daju.

Speaking of "Wonderful Tonight," Britto daju, whose love for music and performance never wanes, does this song during Alumni Day at SAS every year and, being a stickler for details, always looks up its lyrics on his mobile, year after year.

The KMC Years and Parikrama

When we were at KMC, Britto came with his cousins who had formed Flames to take part in a beat contest. They created as great an impact with their live performances as they did with their rockstar attires, which may have been a legacy of the US Band.

Sonam Sherpa used to live in Room 36 at KMC; we were in Room 35. Later he became a much-loved rock guitarist with Parikrama, the KMC band which even today has a cult following, even though they weren't that prolific with their original releases. However, their live performances were a thing to behold. Their band leader Subir Malik, besides being a good musician, also had the managerial aptitude to hold his band together and create a quintessential college fest live music-making machine.

Once in the early nineties, they trained a marriage band to play the opening riffs of "Roadhouse Blues," an antic that went very well with the Delhi folks who could never have their fill of Parikrama. However, they did have their early struggles. Once, I think it was in SRCC, when an Assamese vocalist (or maybe he was their lead guitarist) of a rival band called Jovian Sense planted some people in the crowd to throw vegetables at Parikrama. They not only survived that fusillade of tomatoes and onions but thrived to become the most successful live band in India.

My friend Manohar used to tell that Kathmandu audiences were quite something. They dumped the drummer of Agni in some hotel tank. When Parikrama played with Robin N Looza, someone from the Nepali band tried to downplay Parikrama for their lack of original albums. Robin N Looza did have a point because this band did have quite a few albums of consistent quality. However, parity was restored when a Parikrama member—could be Sonam—gave Robin N Looza an account of the number of live performances they had played, which was in the hundreds.

Besides Sonam, Kalimpong had Suzu daju. Suzu was a stocky presence on the stage. He looked like Maradona and played the guitar like the Argentinian played his soccer. However, it was a point of discussion during those times that he couldn't create much of a wave in Delhi, where he had gone to play for some time, because, being from Kalimpong, he wasn't "much good with gadgets." I unfortunately can only relate this without making any of my own appraisal of the matter. The only time I heard Suzu daju play was when he came to SAS and played that opening of "Money For Nothing." For some of our classmates who were into guitar back then, this was a great feat, not replicated again in SAS.

Jazz and the Deep Dive

Today I listen mostly to jazz. I think I started in 2008 and didn't listen to anything else for the next fifteen years. In fact, my goal as an audiphile is to , within the contraints of budget and availability, put together a system that is optimised to listening jazz music.

In the beginning, I used BitTorrents to download hundreds of jazz albums. I was using something called Bitche to search for torrents and was playing it through Foobar and later a player called cPlay. This was supposed to play music from the RAM and needed helpers like ASIO and recursive cue creator. Since my laptop—an ancient ThinkPad machine—was downloading music 24 hours a day for weeks, I used Ubuntu, a Linux distro. Sometimes these things were made just for Windows, so I needed emulators like Wine.

I was mainly downloading jazz albums based on the recommendations of Piero Scaruffi. You can check his website, which the NY Times once called the greatest website in the world. Later I bought the Penguin Jazz Guide on Kindle and Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz and another book in which he gives recommendations on the standards.

As far as jazz music is concerned, one can spend the rest of one's life just listening to the revisits, reworkings, and reinterpretations of the standards. Something like Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" has been done by hundreds of artists, Gershwin's "Summertime" (actually it's from an opera, Porgy and Bess) by thousands of artists. In Kalimpong, perhaps boys of my generation heard it via Janis Joplin. If you didn't listen to that but pressed forward in your cassette player to get to "Me and Bobby McGee," you did yourself a great disservice. Mr. K.N. Pradhan used to say, "Did you ever open up a dry cell to look what's inside?" If you said you didn't, he would say, "Don't go about doing that now," 'cause discovering something doesn't work like that." I won't go to that extent though. You may still listen to that in her Greatest Hits or the album Cheap Thrills.

You can read more on jazz here.

Building the System

The first serious listening rig I had comprised a DVD player called Ekko. I used it for CDs. The amplifier was NAD 325 BEE and the speakers were Mordaunt Short Avant 901i. It was a system that had good synergy. The NAD amp is warm, muddy even, and the bookshelves packed enough punch to deliver consistently good sound. In fact, when I first heard it, I was blown away. I was coming to this via Intex 5.1 and later Creative 2.1. This one however presented the music with great soundstage, pace, rhythm and timing, resolution and clarity.

However, about this time I was doing most of my educative listening—read about Scaruffi, I wrote earlier—on my laptop. Anthony Braxton, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Lennie Tristano, Dave Holland, Borbetomagus, Carla Bley, Schlippenbach Trio… the list is endless. It wasn't possible to get this on discs. So later I tried to invest in a DAC so that I could connect the laptop to the amp.

My audiophile journey started about the same time as Apoorva's.We were experimenting with varied media , and I bought a BPL world space radio , which I later introduced to Apoorva and he too got one. I had hooked my world space to an Intex 5.1 system and stations like Riff played on it pretty much all hours of the day. But both of us moved on, and Apporva also bought his Cambridge Audio amp and Wharfedale Diamond bookshelves. To his credit, Apoorva also invested in his listening room. In fact, my earliest and perhaps only memory of listening to good music was in his listening room, which reinforced in me the belief that equipment can only do so much. What one listens to is the room. I also bought F. Alton Everest's Master Handbook of Acoustics as a reference, and I still enjoy reading chapters in it now and then. However much of my knowledge came from being a member of various forums that discuss audio. There is a wealth of knowledge and expertise available in them. The willingness of members to help each other out is remarkable.

Boutique Audio and Red Wine

It was when I bought my first non-oversampling DAC made by a small Japanese maker called Musica, that I learned about boutique audio manufacturers. Mr. Sridhar Reddy of ARN Music was kind enough to sell me some great second-hand gear, out of which the battery-powered RedWine Signature 30.2, even till this day, forms the bedrock of my sonic chain. I also bought a small tube-buffered phono, and a 30-watt amp called INT 30, all made by Musica.

The reason why I could get these low-powered amps was because I had moved on from the Mordaunt Short speakers to single-driver DIY speakers. The first one I got was a 70 kg per speaker, Audire Callisto, rear-loaded horn speakers with Fostex drivers. This was made by Audire in Coimbatore and shipped inside a bombproof crate. This stayed with my friend Tuhin in Siliguri for weeks until I was able to get it to Kalimpong.

Unfortunately, as one listens and evolves as a listener, one begins to hear limitations. This horn had a certain "shout" and was very much a one-trick pony, being only good for small ensemble jazz with female vocals and horns. As per Mr. Vinnie Rossi of Red Wine Audio, the speakers that had the greatest synergy with his amp were the Omega speakers made by Mr. Louis Chochos. Importing new ones proved prohibitively costly. Fortunately, a used one became available and I was happy to snap up the Omega Super 8 Alnico speakers as a third and perhaps a terminal owner.

I was however unhappy with my DAC since listening to Saxophone Colossus on Apoorva's system made my computer-based playback sound muddy and weak. "St. Thomas" is such a great song by Sonny and my system wasn't doing much justice. So I had my brother bring in a Marantz CD6002 CD player in 2012.

The Analog Adventure

Later an opportunity to buy some turntables presented itself. Mr. Kuruvilla Jacob sent me—and credit to him that he sent me that TT—a rare Onkyo direct drive. Unfortunately, by the time DTDC brought that item to Kalimpong, it was broken into many pieces. So he offered me an upgrade: a Thorens TD 150 MK2 with Jelco (Sansui) tonearm. This machine is a tweaker's heaven and even though it too, like the Onkyo, came in pieces, I decided to keep it. Enter carpenters like Suraj and Subodh who created new plinth and armboard. And local technicians like Mr. Ajay Sharma and Mr. Laxmi Pradhan, and I was able to recreate a great-sounding turntable. Its sound has a warmth and an air. The analog sweetness that the TD 150 is known for.

I earlier used an Audio-Technica cart supplied by Mr. Jacob, but later upgraded to Nagaoka MP-110. In fact, I am on my second MP-110 today. Just this year I made two upgrades. I also got a direct drive table, Denon DP-1600, and another stylus, the Nagaoka JN P-200. This I put inside the Nagaoka MP-110 body as it's generally considered a 100% physical and 80% electrical fit.

Before I forget, even with all this, my analog reproduction couldn't beat the Marantz CD6002. This was an anomaly since the analog equipment should have sounded much better without the digital harshness of the CD player. The first change I made was with the phono. I got an iFi iPhono Zen 3. I realized one critical area to consider was the mismatch between the impedance of the phono and the upstream (cartridge) and downstream (amplifier) equipment.

As a rule of thumb, the phono input impedance should be 10x the internal impedance of the cartridge (this is critical). Less critical but still important is the 1/10 rule: the phono output impedance must be less than a tenth of the amplifier input impedance. I learned this the hard way. And to complicate things, impedance comprises capacitance and inductance, so even if the impedance matches at, say, 47k ohms but the phono has a capacitance of say 300 pF while the cart is seeking 100–200 pF, the sound gets beat up. For the above readings, the resonant frequency hovers around 10 kHz, which is 5 kHz below the optimum of 15 kHz that jazz music demands.

Record Care and Room Treatment

Besides, I bought some distilled water, isopropyl alcohol, and a lab-grade surfactant called Triton X. I used, for 5 liters of cleaning solution, a 1:5 ratio of the alcohol and water and 1 ml of the Triton X and made a solution to deep clean the records and put them on the drying rack. Before playing, I use the AudioQuest carbon brush to remove the static and dust and a Hummingbird stylus cleaner to remove dust from the needle tip.

Lastly, I have tried to adopt the Cardas audio placement with speakers removed quite a bit from the back and side walls. They are put on isolation balls and placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle with the listening sweet spot being at the third corner. The Audire speakers are placed at the corners behind the speakers to act as traps and diffusers, and two heavy but soft sofas take care of the first reflections.

The journey continues…