AUDIO DENTIST

Dick Pountain /Idealog 375/ 5th October 2025 : 09:53am 

I love music and I love soldering. Here is a story that has both. I’ve explained my opinions about hi-fi here several times: I like good sound quality but I’m not a hi-fi nut, don’t buy oxygen-free cables or onyx cartridges or gold-plated anything (and definitely didn’t colour-in the edges of my CDs with a green marker pen). I won’t spend thousands on any component, and I wrote here how my listening was transformed by connecting a cheap Fosi Class 4 Bluetooth amplifier to my vintage Castle speakers (legacy items from when Dennis Publishing used to publish Hi-Fi Choice magazine). 

All sound from my Chromebook Plus gets routed via Bluetooth through these speakers and I remain delighted by its quality, but a problem arose. I have to attend regular Zoom committee meetings, where we discovered that my Bluetooth remote arrangement was causing irritating echo effects for the other members, so I decided to resort to headphones. I purchased a set of moderately-priced JBL wireless headphones and that solved it, but it also created a slight annoyance for me because the dreaded Bluetooth wouldn’t automatically switch itself, so I had to manually disconnect the Fosi amp in Settings and select the JBLs.

Now with my other, sociological, hat on I’m a keen observer of the doings of GenZ youth, which recently include discovering a preference for vintage digital compact cameras over smartphones and for wired headphones over wireless ones. Aha I thought, in my Santa’s-Grotto-of-retired-digital-artefacts upstairs (covered in a recent column) there must be some of those, and there were indeed two – Sony MDR V100s and Sennheiser HD 201s that I hadn’t used for decades. I tried them, both worked and sounded surprisingly good, but the Sennheisers sounded terrific. So terrific I decided to do the pseudo-scientific thing, an A/B/C comparison with the Sony and Bluetooth JBLs. The result shocked me as I far preferred the Sennheisers. The JBLs were louder and had more bass, but somehow they, and the Sony, were less ‘engaging’. 

Engagement is difficult to discuss without descending into woo-woo. The Sennheisers are very light (plastic and aluminium pressings), oval in shape so they completely encase my ears rather than resting on them. Their sound-stage is better balanced, with bass that’s not so pronounced but ‘right’. (As an aside, I personally judge sound reproduction by just two instruments, acoustic piano and double bass: for my A/B/C test I used the tracks ‘Mademoiselle Mabry’ by Miles Davis and Janacek’s ‘On An Overgrown Path’ played by Josef Páleníček). The Sennheisers induced what we used to call a ‘drugless trip’, where you engage so far that you feel there.  

Problem was, those Sennheisers were made in 2005, the era of plastic-from-hell that turns into chewing gum with age. The outer insulation on their far-too-long cable was rotting and peeling, to reveal not the expected red or black plastic-covered conductors but a gleam of bare copper! I tried insulating tape, Gorilla tape, even silicon sealer, but ended up with an ugly, sticky mess. Wanting them so much emboldened me to replace the cable myself. Gemini taught me that those inner conductors are called ‘tinsel wire’, microscopically thin strips of copper coated with an insulating lacquer that you can’t just scrape off, spirally wound like guitar-strings around a central textile cord. Soldering them is a real challenge and reader, I took it! 

From Amazon I bought two short cables with female RCA plugs going to bare wire, along with a longer cable from 3.5mm jack to twin male RCA plugs. Snipped off the old cable, took out four tiny screws to disassemble each earpiece, only to find a single black-box holding all the gubbins from which emerge two horse-hair-thin tinsel wires lacquered red and blue. YouTube explained how you create of large blob of molten solder and plunge the wire into it: if the temperature is just right that burns off the lacquer (with a puff of smoke), adheres to and tins the copper; if the temperature is too high it burns off the copper too; too low and it doesn’t adhere. I chopped up the old cable to practice and practice, only suffering one painful burn, and then did the deed. 

Reassembling and finding they worked, I punched the air in triumph. Completed the job by discovering that my Chromebook’s two USB-C ports support high-def audio. Back to Amazon for a UGREEN adapter from USB-C to 3.5mm jack that contains a 32bit/384kHz DAC giving more volume and (perhaps) slightly better definition than the audio jack socket. The signal path from recording studio to my eardrums is long and convoluted, via TCP/IP, Wi-Fi and various different AC-DAC-and-backs, but at least I’ve managed to extract one irritating Bluetooth…

[Dick Pountain doesn’t have ‘golden ears’ but he does have dry earwax]

 

 

  

  

LOVE AND HAIDT

Dick Pountain /Idealog 374/ 3rd September 2025 : 10:36am 

It becomes harder and harder to scrabble grains of online pleasure, amusement or edification, but it remains possible (just) on YouTube. I particularly enjoy two grizzled performers, Rick Beato (whose interviews of musicians like Rick Rubin, Guthrie Trapp and Tom Bukovac are priceless) and Jon Stewart, satirical political commentator whose late night Daily Show kept many of us in stitches during the GW Bush presidency. Stewart attempted to retire in 2015 but he’s back, presumably lured by the grim shenanigans in the White House, presenting a new YT version of the Daily Show on Mondays, but on Thursdays an in-depth podcast called The Weekly Show, where a recent guest was the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Haidt is currently controversial for his best-selling book that alleges that smartphone overuse is damaging young peoples’ mental health, but I know and admire his work from reviewing an earlier book called ‘The Righteous Mind’ (2012), an experimental study of the way peoples’ moral outlook affects their political behaviour. Haidt is a leading light of the ‘Intuitionist’ school of psychology which holds that not all our behaviour is rational, and in particular moral judgements like disgust are hard-wired to bypass the reasoning parts of the brain. (His thought-experiments to test this are highly amusing but unsuitable for a family magazine like this, involving incest and molesting chicken dinners). The reason I raise his work in this column is another book I just reviewed, Karen Hao’s ‘Empire Of AI’, an inside glimpse into the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. 

Hao documents three important facts about the company: unanimous agreement that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is possible and the only worthwhile goal; belief that AGI will be achieved by endless ‘scaling’, cramming tens, thousands, millions of Nvidia GPUs into their servers; and a split, right from the very start, between those who think AGI will be great and those who think it will be deadly (many of whom left to set up Anthropic and Claude). Now I’ve stated here several times that I believe AGI is neither desirable nor possible, for reasons that depend upon the work of Haidt among others. If it’s not achievable we won’t face the worst of many imaginary harms like enslavement by robots, but it makes the current monomaniacal hyperscaling futile, dangerous and horribly wasteful. 

Impressive, amusing and addictive as current LLMs and GPTs are, they fall far short of general intelligence because they’re not alive. Unlike Nvidia chips, living beings need food, safety and to reproduce themselves, and these imperatives structure our thought and behaviour profoundly. Billions of years of evolution equipped us with ‘emotions’, chemical computational sub-systems that detect and seek to satisfy needs. The US/Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio postulates that when we store a memory of an event it somehow gets imprinted 

with the emotional/hormonal state at the time (via biochemistry that is barely yet understood). When we retrieve it later to help understand some future event, these emotional markers act as weights (like parameters in an LLM) and contribute to the outcome of our decision. So images and words can never be entirely neutral, they carry subconscious emotional connotations of varying strengths. AI models lack needs and fragile bodies, and hence purpose. Actually smartphones, which can ‘see’ and ‘hear’, know their location and orientation and can travel the world in our pockets (so long as we remember to charge them) are way closer to human experience than ChatGPT is. Equipping one of those highly-capable Boston Dynamics robots with a fully autonomous AGI must remain science fiction so long as GPTs require aircraft-hangar-sized supercomputers and consume megawatts of electricity. Our own bodies have a mitochondrial ‘battery’ in every cell, enabling us to think and/or reproduce ourselves on around 2000 calories a day…

Cognitive psychologists and economists like Haidt and Kahneman have revealed that emotional modes of intuitive thought aren’t reducible either to symbolic logic or Turing computability, and that these mechanisms drive attraction and enmity, friendship or bias and prejudice. They underpin crucial affective human virtues like empathy, wisdom, justice, courage, honesty, compassion and generosity without which any aspiring AGI would merely be a sociopathic silicon solipsist. And most importantly, intuition is vital for creative reasoning, causing those unprecedented leaps between vastly differing conceptual spaces that make up the mind of a Newton, a Mendeleev or an Einstein. The training data for connectionist AI models contains only representations of mental states – text and pictures scraped from the internet – and what emotional weight it does aggregate is mostly bad news, a swamp of hateful and obscene human communication that costs the AI corporations big bucks to hire human beings to painstakingly disinfect, in procedures they call ‘alignment’ and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback)...

[Dick Pountain likes ChatGPT, but in a purely platonic way]