What explains the British ear ?

We have rubbish food, rubbish weather, little sense of style. We've got to do something well. 

And very well you do it too. My latest « discovery » here is the Sonneteer Alabaster integrated amp. One of the two brands I've encountered that could tempt me away from Naim. 

I bet a factor is the amazing breadth and depth of British (and British based) contemporary music talent since the 60s. I can't imagine a kid today saving pocket money for a decent record deck (or modern-day equiv.) Decent music must correlate to a desire to hear it well rendered.

We have more geeks.

G

We do engineering well from a design and development perspective.

Marketing and production in quantity less so... but specialist HiFi always remained a niche.

Part of the answer is that there is still a market for those things in Britain, and there are still people who are very keen on top-notch "hifi" - which does not necessarily mean expensive (contrary to the US market). I was at the newsagent's today, there's only one hifi magazine in France now - and it's not very good (well, it's better than the French version of What Hifi - why on earth did they ever bother to "translate" What Hifi into French, I wonder).

Which does not mean that European hifi is bad, far from it. There are a number of manufacturers in France, Germany, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, which are very good - they never make it across the channel, because there's so much competition in Britain that you don't need more firms entering the market.

Sir Thomas Beecham made the interesting and not entirely unfounded view known:

“The English do not actually like music, but they love the sound it makes!"

Perhaps that tells us why the Germans [who do love music] considered England the “Land without Music" from the death of Handel [German of course] to the emergence of Elgar. 

The greatest advances in the replay of music have consistently been made in the Britain since the beginning of recorded music, and that should be no surprise in view of Beecham’s comment, I would think.

ATB from George

I think having sh-t weather has a lot to do with it. Here in miserable windy Wellington there is a busy hifi scene , in sunny Auckland they are too busy getting out and about in their boats, beach houses and restaurants. Hifi is a very indoor pursuit.

George Fredrik Fiske posted:

Sir Thomas Beecham made the interesting and not entirely unfounded view known:

“The English do not actually like music, but they love the sound it makes!"

Perhaps that tells us why the Germans [who do love music] considered England the “Land without Music" from the death of Handel [German of course] to the emergence of Elgar. 

The greatest advances in the replay of music have consistently been made in the Britain since the beginning of recorded music, and that should be no surprise in view of Beecham’s comment, I would think.

ATB from George

I hope you're not suggesting that the British listen to their hifi rather than to the music...

British Hi-Fi mags are distributed around Europe - because most of us understand the language, and UK is in more than one way nearer to us than US. This helps in sustaining and growing not just the mags, but also British Hi-Fi, which is well presented in these mags.

But I guess British Hi-Fi had a good start even before the mags. There was the BBC speaker development. There was Tiefenbrun and Vereker...

British popular music is not too bad either

hafler3o posted:

I bet a factor is the amazing breadth and depth of British (and British based) contemporary music talent since the 60s. I can't imagine a kid today saving pocket money for a decent record deck (or modern-day equiv.) Decent music must correlate to a desire to hear it well rendered.

This makes a lot of sense. So perhaps the question should have been "What explains the British talent for musical innovation?" 

British Hi-Fi mags are distributed around Europe

Really???? I know I can always find the whole range of British magazines at W.H.Smith's in Paris, but I'd be grateful if you could tell me where else I can find them... and I live in a city of one million individuals (with just  two hifi shops...).

Frenchnaim posted:

George Fredrik Fiske posted:

Sir Thomas Beecham made the interesting and not entirely unfounded view known:

“The English do not actually like music, but they love the sound it makes!"

Perhaps that tells us why the Germans [who do love music] considered England the “Land without Music" from the death of Handel [German of course] to the emergence of Elgar. 

The greatest advances in the replay of music have consistently been made in the Britain since the beginning of recorded music, and that should be no surprise in view of Beecham’s comment, I would think.

ATB from George

I hope you're not suggesting that the British listen to their hifi rather than to the music...

I think Beecham was, and I cannot disagree in so many cases!

ATB from George

Yes I know, you are in France, sorry   

I guess you have to just download the online versions then?

I wonder how Thomas Beecham & the Germans of that time who considered England the “Land without Music" would assess the music situation in UK now.  Notwithstanding that some amongst us consider popular music as unworthy;  I have in mind the serious well crafted & well played of all forms of modern music, rock, folk, jazz etc..  There is little doubt that UK has been at or close to the forefront of most of this since the early 1960's.   Add to that the summer pop & folk festivals, Glastonbury, Cambridge, Cropredy etc.,  the outstanding concert venues,  the UK orchestra's & finally where else in the world has anything like The Proms.  The only thing we might be missing is the list of classical composers,  but start looking & we are not doing so bad, Elgar,  Tallis, Parry, Purcell & a few others & we aren't doing so bad.  Finally the icing on the cake is the Brit hifi industry.

To get back to Jan-Erik's original question,  all the previous posts have it covered,  but one thing I would add to the the lousy stuff that HH listed is the Brits also make really lousy maple syrup    

Music is organized sound. Perhaps Beecham's remark can be taken another way, in that the British have a more finely tuned (or developed) ear to really hear sounds. A deeper understanding of how sounds are created, organized, and their effects on us would naturally lead to the search for better ways to reproduce them (hifi) and organize them (musical innovation).

Jan-Erik Nordoen posted:

hafler3o posted:

I bet a factor is the amazing breadth and depth of British (and British based) contemporary music talent since the 60s. I can't imagine a kid today saving pocket money for a decent record deck (or modern-day equiv.) Decent music must correlate to a desire to hear it well rendered.

This makes a lot of sense. So perhaps the question should have been "What explains the British talent for musical innovation?" 

Ha! Fertile conditions for the social commentators, freedom of expression, a public avid for consumption, bands competing for 'top spot', 'loudest pa' etc, drugs consumed prior to and after 'creative' sessions, groupies, fame, a decent public and 'hands off' national broadcaster, the invention of baldness by 'Right Said Fred' and The Smiths inspiring everyone (that last one is a giant fib!)

Given the choice between

'The Sound of Music', 'The Sound of Silence' and 'The Sound of Sound' I take option 3 and my complete collection of Eno.

A specific British gene?

Dear Jan,

Elgar was the first great composer to recognise the gramophone as a means of communicating his music to a wider public. consequently he recorded something like fourteen hours of electrically recorded music on hundreds of 78 sides [total period 1914 to 1934 and electricals from 1926], and these remain a significant first in Western Art Music ...

Elgar and Beecham had a very on-off relationship! Their aims in making records were the same for all that. To broaden the appeal of music. The trouble starts when - as listeners - we obsess too much about sounds rather than music.

ATB from George

The BBC? I'm not sure whether it was a unique public broadcasting institution in Europe, but surely it was at the forefront of recording and reproduction technology for many years from the twenties. I thought of this because there are three speaker manufacturers mentioned in the first post that probably wouldn't exist today without the BBC. 

Frenchnaim posted:

A specific British gene?

Thanks for that. I just checked and there's a whole area of study that I'd never heard of called "Music genetics research"... If you have the inclination, search for "The genetic basis of  music ability". I quote:

The gene AVPR1A on chromosome 12q has also been implicated in music perception, music memory, and music listening, whereas SLC6A4 on chromosome 17q has been associated with music memory and choir participation.

Researchers generally agree though that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the broader realization of music ability.

Cdb posted:

The BBC? I'm not sure whether it was a unique public broadcasting institution in Europe, but surely it was at the forefront of recording and reproduction technology for many years from the twenties. I thought of this because there are three speaker manufacturers mentioned in the first post that probably wouldn't exist today without the BBC. 

A very good point. If you trace the history of loudspeaker designers and manufacturers, for many, you end up at one place: the Research Department of the BBC, which conducted what is probably the most comprehensive and lengthy research programme ever into the design and performance of loudspeaker components. Everything was examined, from drivers to crossovers to cone materials to enclosures, using measurements and critical listening, the objective being to identify criteria that would ensure accurate reproduction in both professional and domestic environments. 

Still, it took good ears to carry out this work, which brings us back to the first question...

There's also the fact that music has its rightful place in the British education system. In other places (France, for instance), music is very much an activity which you do outside school, which means lots of youngsters never get the chance of playing an instrument, of getting acquainted with "real" music.

I wonder if there is something about the mentality of British inventors too ... unrelated to HiFi, but there is a story told (probably slightly apocryphal) that Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber - the brains behind Acorn - visited Intel or another microprocessor company and saw the design process, etc.  On returning to Cambridge they sat down and decided between them "That doesn't look too difficult (to design a processor)" and within a couple of months the first prototype for the ARM processor was born, designed on a BBC Micro.  

The decedents of that ARM processor of course power your Apple iPhone / iPad, most Android devices not to mention your Naim streamer...

Anyway just wondering if a similar mentality coming out of Cambridge (and maybe Oxford) helped to develop the British HiFi industry ... certainly companies like Arcam, Cyrus and Meridian are born of the Fens.