I think it’s fairly common to associate certain songs—albums even—with specific times in one’s life. Being a just-barely boomer, many of my musical associations involve classic rock from my youth. Things like Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” immediately bring back memories of the sun rising as the acid wears off.
I’ve heard that smell is the strongest sense for evoking memories. I’d argue against that and suggest that hearing, specifically music, is a far more immediate memory-dredging sense.
Entanglement
Back in late 1997, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Due to an error in diagnosis, it wasn’t discovered until it had metastasized and become inoperable. So began a course of chemotherapy, which meant weekly trips to Toronto General Hospital in downtown Toronto. I made a point of driving my parents and accompanying them to each treatment and consultation.
Around that time, I began listening to the album Interiors by the post-grunge group Brad. There was nothing especially notable about this record. It contained several catchy songs and was competently executed. The sound was middle-of-the-road—well-produced but far from audiophile quality. Still, I found myself gravitating to its introspective, intelligent lyrics, its clever, stretched-out hooks. Interiors, in an odd way, became the soundtrack to this fraught period in my life.
In early 1998, the doctors reported that the chemotherapy treatment had not been effective at reducing the size of the tumor. We weren’t surprised, as my father’s health was deteriorating. We were referred to Princess Margaret Hospital across the road for a course of palliative radiation therapy.
Long story short, my father, Tony Thorpe, died on May 8, 1998. We scattered his ashes in the Ganaraska Forest just outside of Toronto, at the top of a particularly steep hill—we used to ride dirt bikes in the Ganny, and this hill he had never been able to conquer. It’s now officially known as Thorpe Hill.
From that day onward, I didn’t play Interiors very often, but when I did, it immediately evoked memories of supporting my parents during that sad, difficult time.
Fast-forward seven years. It was May 8, 2005, and I was browsing through a furniture store—HomeSense or some such franchise operation—with a friend. We weren’t really shopping for anything, just killing time. I was aware that it was the anniversary of my father’s death, but such dates don’t typically seem profound to me, so I wasn’t sad—more wistful, I’d say. It meant the sun had circled the earth for another orbit, but other than reminding me of that event, it had never really given me much pause.
But this year was different. While we were strolling around, picking stuff up and putting it down, “The Day Brings” from Interiors began to play over the Muzak/PA system.
Interiors peaked at #30 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart, but that’s far from impressive. “The Day Brings” was released as a single, but up to that point I had never heard it on the radio. Interiors is a total under-the-radar album. It seemed highly unlikely it would receive play in a suburban furniture franchise. Yet there I was, on the anniversary of the death of my father, presented with an immediate, powerful reminder of that time. From a more mechanical viewpoint, how could this be? How could this thing happen at this time, to me? As Ted Hughes said in the poem “Bayonet Charge,”
In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations
Was he the hand pointing that second?
I wasn’t a believin’ man, and I’m still not—I prefer to see the world as it is, without needing superstitions to soothe my existential fears. Are there things in this world that I don’t understand? Of course. Quantum physics is so counterintuitive that it’s positively frightening, so I don’t think about it much. I only worry about what I can see and touch. But this. Hearing this song played on this day seemed like a call across time, and across that one boundary from which nobody comes back.
Matt’s headphone amp
For SoundStage!’s last few Europe-bound trips—Audio Video Show in Warsaw and High End in Munich—Matt Bonaccio has accompanied Doug and me. Matt lives in Syracuse, NY, and we’ve been flying out of Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Doug’s connecting flight dumps him into Toronto from his hometown of Ottawa, ON, and we three board together for Europe.
So Matt drives up from Rochester to my house, which is right close to downtown Toronto and a short Uber ride from the airport shuttle train. Matt parks his car in our visitors’ parking area for the week, and when we arrive back in Toronto, he either stays the night in our guest bedroom or hops in his car and rips home, depending on our arrival time.
This year, when he arrived in Toronto prior to our flight to Warsaw, Matt had a couple of gifts. Matt is a real renaissance man, and he presented Marcia with a loaf of homemade fresh-baked bread. “I’ve got something special for you, Thorpe,” he said to me, and we moved down to my listening room, where he unbagged what initially looked like a raw circuit board.
“This is an ACP+ headphone amp,” he explained. “That stands for Amp Camp Preamp. It’s a Nelson Pass design that came out of one of his Amp Camp events where participants can spend the day building one of his designs.”
As I turned the amp over in my hands, I was deeply impressed at the neatness of the layout and the clean solder joints. If I hadn’t known otherwise, I would have thought it was wave-soldered.
“It’s quite easy to build,” Matt continued. “Took me an hour or two, but a rank beginner could knock this off in an afternoon. The basic design is a single-ended MOSFET circuit, with careful consideration given to harmonic distortion quality as well as quantity.
“That’s an Alps volume pot,” he said with pride. “Everyone should build one of these. But I guess you don’t have to now.”
The amp consists of two identically sized circuit boards separated by a spacer at each corner. At first, I thought that the lower board was there just to protect the underside and its solder joints. Turns out that the ground plane runs through that bottom board, so I guess it serves two purposes. The ACP+ has two sets of single-ended inputs, selectable by a toggle switch. There’s one pass-through output also. The ACP+ kit is available online from DIY Audio should you wish to build one of your own.
I was jammed for time after I returned from Warsaw, with many comings and goings, both in my own system and in those of My Audiophile Neighbors—the most recent episode being the ongoing construction of Quentin and Laurielle’s new streaming system. So it took me a few weeks to get going on the hookup of Matt’s ACP+ amp. A slight tickle of guilt would badger me each time I came down to my listening room and saw the amp that Matt had built with his own hands.
Over the last month I’ve had some stability in my system. Bowers & Wilkins collected their 801 D4 Signatures and I moved my motorcycle into the garage, so the big chores are done. So I ran a set of Nordost Tyr 2 interconnects from the single-ended outputs of my Meitner Audio MA3 DAC/streamer to the ACP+. I alternated between my Sennheiser HD 599s and my Periodic Audio Carbon IEMs for headphones.
Before I go any further, I should tell you that I’m not really a headphone person. I use ’phones when I’m traveling, and occasionally when I’m walking the dog. So there’s basically no critical listening done, with headphones, by me. For a headphone amp, I mostly use the $39 (all prices in USD) Periodic Audio Rhodium DAC/amp that came with the $199 Carbon IEMs. It’s tiny, attaches to the jack, and fits in the little tin that came with the Carbons. I plug that into the USB-C port on either my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra or my HP laptop.
Now, the Rhodium sounds ok, and I’ve been happy with it for the most part. But seriously—how can something this tiny perform at anything more than the absolute minimum quality? Especially when it’s pitifully trying to compete with the Meitner Audio DAC and this obviously well-designed ACP+!
From the very first second when I slipped the HD 599s over my ears I found myself immersed in music that seemed like it was coming from everywhere. There was a universe in here, full of active space, things happening, lives lived. While straight-ahead rock sounded great, any music even remotely atmospheric just exploded with detail and weird-ass spatial cues that circled my head like the stars and birds whirling around a Looney Tunes character after he’s been clobbered.
My other DAC/amp
Bass through both the HD 599s and the Carbons was far tighter and richer than I’d ever heard through headphones. That said, it was a totally different bass experience than out-loud listening offers. I could hear the bass, but I couldn’t feel it. Of course this goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway, as I’ve lived with a bunch of bass monsters lately, like the Bowers & Wilkins 801 D4 Signatures and the DALI Epikore 9s (review coming very soon). So kick me in the balls if I’m not willing or able to suspend my disbelief when it comes to bass reproduced via tiny drivers. Still, a huge improvement over the pissant bass that came out of the Rhodium.
This isn’t a formal review, because I don’t have the space to go into my usual detail about nuances of sound quality. Also, I don’t have sufficient experience upon which to draw, so I can’t make any conclusions as to how the ACP+ stacks up against other full-sized headphone amps. But I won’t let that stop me. I so thoroughly enjoyed this short experience with the ACP+, I’m going to have to spend more time with it.
I’ve listened to high-end ’phones and amps at various audio shows, but those experiences have never been this profound. Shows are so very noisy that even with sealed headphones, ambient noise permeates the experience. This makes it extremely difficult for a headphone neophyte like me to come away with an idea of what’s possible with this technology. But here, in my silent listening room, I finally got it.
I don’t think I would have considered making my own ACP+, but I don’t have to, because Matt did it for me. I’ll tell you this, though: I’m sure glad he did. My next step is to figure out how to get this thing safely installed, without tripping hazards, within easy reach of my listening chair.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
