My other job is... Noodle Man
Whether it’s hi-fi or soba, Sony’s Chief Distinguished Engineer will settle only for perfection
A masterclass from Sony’s top audio designer? Most hi-fi enthusiasts would jump at the chance, but they might not get what they expected. Instead of capacitors and cables they’d find themselves pondering the right flour and precise amount of water – in search not of the perfect sound but the perfect soba.
Soba are thin noodles made from buckwheat flour, which the Japanese eat in a hot, thin broth, or chilled with a dipping sauce if the weather’s hot and humid. They’re a national obsession: every street corner and train station has a counter at which customers politely slurp their way through a bowl or two. It was this need for noodles that led to the invention of the instant cup-noodle in the late 1950s, the precursor of the curiously British Pot Noodle.
Some people are keen enough to make their noodles from scratch at home, but few go as far as Takashi Kanai, Sony’s Chief Distinguished Engineer. He’s created a personal website that’s a shrine to soba and a mine of information for the would-be noodle-maker. Or at least, the Japanese-reading would-be noodle-maker, although anyone can watch the comprehensive video lessons on the site and get an idea of the process.
At first this enthusiasm seems at odds with the talent behind many of Sony’s major audio projects, from analogue amplifiers and the early CD players right up to today’s multichannel home cinema receivers, but Kanai takes the whole business of design and engineering very seriously. When Sony’s home audio department moved to a swish glass-clad skyscraper a few years back, his old listening room was recreated in the new building with a meticulousness that suggested a helicopter had lifted it from one location to the other. The room’s sound is now familiar worldwide: all Sony’s current ES series receivers use complex digital processing to make your system sound just like Kanai’s set-up.
Kanai, who joined Sony in 1978 with the simple request to let him make an amplifier, has developed some truly landmark products. These range from the CDP-R1 CD player, which sold for around £3,000 and influenced many other manufacturers, to the massive TA-E9000ES/TA-N9000ES surround-sound processor and amplifier, which sold an impressive 18,000 units worldwide and put Sony back on the high-end AV map (while enjoying the challenge, Kanai actually made himself ill in the process).
The Distinguished Chief Engineer doesn’t travel by plane these days (he needs to preserve his ears for his work, and all those changes of atmospheric pressure are a real problem), and he takes his attention to detail in product design to fanatical lengths. Who else would have realised that the colour of an amplifier’s speaker connections can affect the sound? Apparently it’s all to do with how different pigments affect resonances.
All of this might suggest a stereotypical audiophile, sitting alone long into the night in a stripped-out listening room, but Kanai is a 53-year-old family man who takes time to pass on his passion for soba. “There are parallels between making the perfect soba and designing the best products we can,” he says. “It’s all about analysing what works and what doesn’t, and setting a pattern that, if followed, will give the best possible results. For example, if you add too much water to the soba mixture, it becomes sandy or gritty, so you have to know precisely the correct amount of water – something I discovered only after lengthy analysis.”
So how did this fascination begin? “I was travelling, and visited an event where people were invited to try making soba for themselves. I had a go, and when the result was cooked it was delicious. The next day I bought my own soba-making equipment.” And where does he most enjoy eating soba? “At home, where there are none of the pressures you find in a commercial restaurant kitchen. I select the flour and other ingredients very carefully, and can take my time.”
You’d expect a soba fanatic to take a dim view of the Japanese cup-noodle, just as a European foodie might regard a Happy Meal with disdain. Far from it. “I love cup noodles – they’re not so good for the health, but I eat them often. When I’m working late, I usually buy a cup noodle from the vending machine in the office.”
Even then it’s impossible to stop Kanai’s love of engineering and know-how kicking in. “I once piled the empty noodle cups so high they reached the ceiling – thus was born the office legend of Kanai-san’s Empty Cup Tower.”
Kanai-san’s soba masterclass can be viewed at kanaimaru1.web.fc2.com/soba/movie/Atom_First.wmv
Story by Andrew Everard
Special translation thanks to Yasuko Ryogoku