April (Fools) 2008

The JeffPod: Mastering The Seas Of Audio
Article By Jeff Rabin

I don't like to brag
– who does? – but lately I have been doing really rather well at extreme
endurance events such as 100 mile runs across the dessert to long distance
rowboating and felt it was my duty to share my ground breaking discoveries
in hi-fi with you.

It occurred to me that if hi-fi was to advance from its
present trifurcation between the subjectivists and their single ended triodes
and bamboo paper coned single driver horns, the Krellista, and the ear bud
wearing, iPod swinging MP3 listening, unwashed, it was incumbent upon me to heal
the rift.
While only finished 2nd in the solo rowboat across
the Atlantic race, I would have finished first had the winner not broken every
rule in the book by having antibiotics dropped to him after he negligently cut
himself with a spork, or so he says. Rules are rules and I would never have
thought to call in support after that rogue whale mistook my boat for a
prospective mate and mounted me and my vessel. Before successfully beating off
the randy (and appropriately named) sperm whale with my carbon fiber oar, I have
to say came perilously close to understanding the Biblical story of Jonah first
hand.
While
I of course had to give up a lot on my rowboat –- company, hot food, a place
to stretch my legs, shelter from the storm – I could not give up my music.
Moreover, as I only ever listen to live music (when given the choice), I had to
have live music on the boat. But to bring along my own chanteuse – which of
course would have its obvious ‘friends with benefits' benefits – that would
be breaking the rules and you know how I feel about rules.
I had originally thought of modding my Bateman rebuilt
Studer-Revox Reel to Reel and installing it in the back of the boat and placing
my beloved ESL57s on the foredeck, I just didn't have the space. It also
seemed impractical to switch master tapes in the thirty-foot swells. In
addition, what if they got wet? My priceless collection would be lost to the
generations to come.
So I like many of the unwashed – as I was soon to become –
I thought I might go with an iPod. What a disappointment. Absolutely, jaw-uppingly
unlistenable.
The concept, however, so to speak, seemed sound. It just
needed re-execution with cost no object components and the sort of general
malaise only the genius possess and the insane lament. The project came to take
a life of its own and I am sure I would have come first in the race had I spent
more time prepping my boat and less time tweaking my 21st century
walkman.
While the Jeffpod started as an iPod once I was done there was
little left except the case: getting someone to mill magnesium billet on such
short notice proved impossible.
My first task was to scour eBay for the right iPod. I knew
that as the initial Toyota Corollas that came into Canada built with better
steel and closer tolerances, there were uber-ipods
that Apple had unleashed upon the world built well beyond normal factory
tolerances to establish the brand.
Of course, Apple did not exactly advertise this fact, but I
knew they were out there with their better batteries, titanium cases, 2,500,000
hour mean time between failure hand selected drives and sprinkling of hand
selected op-amps (funnily enough with their markings scraped off). Securing my 1st
generation cadaver proved surprisingly, though not cheap, easy: eBay.
Apparently, some prankster at Apple sent one personally engraved with the
initials SJ to each and every member of the board of Sony.

From Left to Right, N. Ohga,
President; A. Morita, Chairman; M. Ibuka, Honorary Chairman; and K. Narita, Vice
Chairman. Back left: M. Morizono, Deputy President, and M. Morita, Deputy
President.
Unsurprisingly unamused, they were, however, wise enough to
send down the players to the Sony Skunkworks at Area 51 (you didn't know Sony
ran the place?) to be taken to bits. I won't say what I paid, but I really
should have spent more on the boat.
My expectations for the iPod weren't high, but I expected
much, much better.( I shudder at the thought of how horrible a consumer grade
Ipod must sound.)
While it would seem time for me to get out the soldering iron,
it was time to brush up on RISC assembly language and rewrite the firmware to
handle 24-bit wave files.
(Could never, however, get the iPod to play SACD. Cannot tell
you how long I worked at reverse engineering Sony's software. I have even been
told that I occasionally speak DSD in my sleep.)
Then I rebuilt the iPod, replacing the DAC with a one bit
filterless design of my own design (patent pending) and everything else with
only the finest, hand selected ‘by me' components.
The ‘by me', here, is the important bit.
I am not sure I will do it again. Listening to a couple
hundred vintage cryogenically treated op amps to find the one
or two with that certain je ne
sais quoi grew bit tedious, but op-amp no. 269 made it all worth it.
Sorry
guys. No spares as I sold the rest to NASA at quite a profit, something to do
with getting the gyros to spin at the right speed on the International Space
Station. Part of the deal, however, was that I keep my discovery to myself.
Not content with the original pcb of the iPod, I hard wired a
replacement in silver, correcting along the way what I understood to be Mr. Jobs'
cost cutting measures. What a mistake! Too glossy sounding by half. Perhaps
‘the other Steve' does know a thing or two. He certainly has a nice
plane. After two months, however, in the metallurgy lab at the University of
Toronto with the good Dr. Rumplestiltzkin I finally stumbled upon a gold amalgam
(I cannot tell you the precise details as I am presently in negotiations with
Kondo-San Jr. for phonograph motors) that I could live with.
In exchange, K-Junior (as I call him) provided me with some of
the finest bamboo caps I have ever had the pleasure of placing under the
fingernails of that nasty manufacturer who questioned my golden ears.
Still
things weren't quite right. Then it dawned on me, the Jeffpod needed a tubed
output stage. Doesn't everything these days? Nevertheless, how to fit tubes and
proper output transformers in a case smaller than a deck of cards? Then it hit
me, use those step up transformers (backwards) from those vintage Ortofon SPU
Headshells at the bottom of my drawer with that gross of nuvistors that I had
personally harvested from the ‘decommissioned' ICBM that I bought in a job lot
in South London from Trotters Independent Traders.
After abandoning my rebuilt Quad ESL57s from the fore deck
because they both created unwanted wind resistance and interfered with my
stroking, I decided to back to my trusty, custom ‘by me again' Stax
Earspeakers complete with tubed energizer energized with a mixture of NOS East
German Telefunken and pre-war Seimens.
Still, it didn't sound like my masters even with the Stax
headphones that I would consider the bare minimum for listening (quite a scary
proposition when you come to think of the 300 volt differential on either side
of your noggin and the salt water spray.) What was wrong?
I figured it out; the system was now so ruthlessly revealing
and transparent that it revealed all the defects of my 2nd generation
masters which I had digitized with the Meitner. I needed to go to ‘The Source.'
This took months of negotiation but they finally (I suppose
they were just sick of me) threw me the keys to the vaults.
Gaining access to the original tapes of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin
and remastering them in the way that Bonham and Scott would have liked had they
the equipment, expertise, and desire gave the results I was looking for. After
carefully importing these into iTunes at half-speed with my dCS Handel-Hendrix
rack system (not yet available to the public), I came away more or less
satisfied with the Jeffpod but I still felt there was room for improvement.
I only built the system as I wanted something portable to
listen to while soloing the Atlantic in my 33-foot rowboat and once I recover
from the race I will keep on the project. You will not, however, see my name
listed for purposes of security on the various solo the Atlantic websites.
(Certain Danes are after me for my wire.) In any event, the new system makes the
old REVOX in the shopping trolley I dragged behind during my last 100 miles
across the Nevada dessert after the last CES.
Yours In Hi-Fi,
Dr. M. Jeffrey Rabin, Dr. M. Jeffrey Rabin, B.A. (honours,
Toronto), Msc. (econ.), Ph.D. (econ.)