Someone today may want to put together a better than average hi fi system for reasons that did not exist 50 or 60 years ago in the golden-age of audio. Back then, everyone wanted a decent hi fi system to listen to music. Unlike today, music was typically heard live, unamplified, and played in a natural acoustic setting such as a concert or recital hall or a club. Hi fi enthusiasts read Gramophone or JazzTimes, not Stereophile or The Absolute Sound. The systems of that day were lush and musical with perhaps a radio or turntable source. Tubes provided a modest amount of amplification, and speakers were created from medium-sized wooden-boxes with some internal bracing. These systems sounded good, and many are still operating or are even emulated today for the large measure of musical enjoyment they offer, but technology and time has the capacity to take us well beyond those golden days. Today, once one ventures beyond a basic music system, component choices are more complex: more powerful, more revealing amplifiers; larger speakers made out of high-tech materials and proprietary drivers and precisely tuned crossovers, and a greater variety of different types of sources and source components. In the golden age, simple patch cords and lamp cord linked components, whereas today there are many options for high performance cabling and power conditioning to tie the whole system together. Today, consumers also have access to attractive, reasonably priced, and effective acoustic room treatments that go beyond the capability and clunky appearance of Sonex(r). I believe we are on the verge of experiencing an even greater golden age of audio, but there are barriers standing in the way. This thread is the first of a series where I will try to help some of you get beyond these barriers.
Today, the reasons people put together better hi fi systems can go beyond the quest to get closer to music. Our culture not only embraces technological advances, but fewer people have the time, interest, or money to seek out live unamplified music played in a natural acoustic environment. With the ubiquity of electronically produced music and the technological ferocity of today’s best hi fi components, it is just as valid a reason today to pursue a better hi fi as an end unto itself rather than thinking one should try to recreate in your home a facsimile of the way unamplified music sounds in a performance space. To those of you who are pursuing hi fi as an end unto itself, please continue to have fun and experiment with sound in a way that satisfies you. You don’t really need advice. You do the research, and you know what you want. Please read on, however, if you like the idea of expanding your connection to hi fi to include more music.
To that end, it is also just as valid to pursue a better hi fi system for all of the reasons above and also to try to recreate music experiences at home. Today’s best hi fi systems are not only capable of delivering a compelling music experience regardless of genre, they also give the technophile a chance to explore new technologies like streaming, advanced construction techniques and materials, and design advances. These are exciting times, but unless you are an audio technology and music expert, putting together a great sound system can be a long, costly, and winding journey.
Where should you go for audio advice if you are not an expert? Do you rely on audio journal reviews, Internet chatter, what your friends think, what a manufacturer recommends, audio dealer recommendations, or hearing demonstrations at consumer audio shows?
In this thread, we will explore how helpful audio journals can be in helping someone put together a great audio system.
An important purpose of audio journal reviews is to become more familiar with all the options for equipment that are out there, but reviews have real limitations in terms of providing enough information to make a good decision about actually purchasing a specific component or putting together a great sounding system. What a reviewer recommends may not be a well-balanced companion for the rest of your system components or listening environment. Reviewers don’t explain how a specific component will sound to you in your system with your source material. They can only provide their point of view, and there is only a small percentage of reviewers out there (names withheld to protect the guilty) who genuinely have had much experience playing acoustic musical instruments or listening to live, unamplified music. Dedicated, professional, acoustically treated listening environments are largely absent among the review press. Should you trust the opinion of a reviewer who listens in a room which is randomly different from your own listening environment? Some reviewers do not have an extensive and eclectic music collection to broaden their musical perspectives. They have their favorite cuts that they listen to again and again to evaluate a component. Can you ever hear their favorite cuts the way they hear them? Very few reviewers have a reference system with which all else can be compared. The audio press is more oriented to comparing one thing with another using short-term A-B listening without any point of reference. They talk in terms of differences as if these differences are a justification for thinking that something is actually better than something else. How can they possibly tell what’s actually better for you with so many variables involved in their evaluation methods?
This never ending cycle of short term listening to specific components without a point of reference for the purpose of writing the next review should not have logically achieved any momentum in the audio world. The audio press, however, has managed to create their own aura of expertise by inventing a language to describe hi fi phenomena: sound stage, depth, focus, detail, and slam. These are hi fi terms, not music terms. Consequently, many of the systems and the components which seem to be preferred by the review press embody these hi fi qualities while giving little or no attention to the essential quality that is fundamental to a satisfying music listening experience — natural musical tonal balance.
I have heard many systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with individual components that have all received rave reviews that sound excruciatingly bad musically. Simple, basic, reasonably priced systems actually can sound musically superior to these out-of-balance mega-systems. Fifty or 60 years ago, the simple systems of the day might not have been able to reproduce the last measure of the low-level information, dynamic range, or symphonic scale of music heard live, but they universally delivered musical enjoyment. Regardless of the price tag, good hi fi systems today should deliver it all: powerful and very revealing and compelling music listening experiences that are capable of suspending your belief that you are listening to a hi fi. What the audio press typically provides for advice, however, makes it almost impossible to know how to put together a system and create a listening environment that is truly capable of delivering musical magic.
If you are shopping for a single component, making a purchase decision based upon an audio review also doesn’t necessarily help you feel good about your investment if you find out, for example, several months down the road that the reviewer has found a “new and better” (read as ”different”) component to write about. It also doesn’t help you feel good about your investment if the component doesn’t really give you the experience you are looking for in your system.
Unfortunately, audio journal hi fi language and the hi fi sound that it represents have permeated all aspects of our industry: audio shows, manufacturing, retail outlets, and consumer preferences. Consequently, no single source of information is reliable if your goal is to create musical magic in your home.
Some audio manufacturers actually design components specifically to reflect audio reviewer hi fi standards to increase the likelihood of getting a favorable review.
Beware also of so-called audio experts who pride themselves in being able to create a perfect mix of components that offset each other’s weaknesses and strengths. Many of them have been unduly influenced by the press and the hi fi standards they embrace. The fault with this approach is that once something is lost in a signal path, it is never truly regained, and once something is added to the signal path, it alters the performance of every other component so that it no longer performs as the manufacturer intended. These compensating systems tend to sound tonally stripped of musical foundation. The search for perfection becomes all about hearing more details and hearing an artificially deep and expansive sound field (created by choosing system components and room set ups that depress mid and lower frequencies). The hi fi sound presentation of these systems may be initially appealing, but the human ear can’t be fooled about the natural sound of music over the long term. We are born with all the faculties required to differentiate between what is real and what is a loose facsimile. If your underlying mission is to bring your home listening experiences closer to hearing music played live, there are plenty of great options to explore regardless of your budget or musical tastes.
In a future thread, we will discuss further why live, unamplified music played in a natural acoustic environment should be the gold standard for evaluating sound regardless of your music preferences and why long-term listening is really the only way to evaluate a system change.
Today, the reasons people put together better hi fi systems can go beyond the quest to get closer to music. Our culture not only embraces technological advances, but fewer people have the time, interest, or money to seek out live unamplified music played in a natural acoustic environment. With the ubiquity of electronically produced music and the technological ferocity of today’s best hi fi components, it is just as valid a reason today to pursue a better hi fi as an end unto itself rather than thinking one should try to recreate in your home a facsimile of the way unamplified music sounds in a performance space. To those of you who are pursuing hi fi as an end unto itself, please continue to have fun and experiment with sound in a way that satisfies you. You don’t really need advice. You do the research, and you know what you want. Please read on, however, if you like the idea of expanding your connection to hi fi to include more music.
To that end, it is also just as valid to pursue a better hi fi system for all of the reasons above and also to try to recreate music experiences at home. Today’s best hi fi systems are not only capable of delivering a compelling music experience regardless of genre, they also give the technophile a chance to explore new technologies like streaming, advanced construction techniques and materials, and design advances. These are exciting times, but unless you are an audio technology and music expert, putting together a great sound system can be a long, costly, and winding journey.
Where should you go for audio advice if you are not an expert? Do you rely on audio journal reviews, Internet chatter, what your friends think, what a manufacturer recommends, audio dealer recommendations, or hearing demonstrations at consumer audio shows?
In this thread, we will explore how helpful audio journals can be in helping someone put together a great audio system.
An important purpose of audio journal reviews is to become more familiar with all the options for equipment that are out there, but reviews have real limitations in terms of providing enough information to make a good decision about actually purchasing a specific component or putting together a great sounding system. What a reviewer recommends may not be a well-balanced companion for the rest of your system components or listening environment. Reviewers don’t explain how a specific component will sound to you in your system with your source material. They can only provide their point of view, and there is only a small percentage of reviewers out there (names withheld to protect the guilty) who genuinely have had much experience playing acoustic musical instruments or listening to live, unamplified music. Dedicated, professional, acoustically treated listening environments are largely absent among the review press. Should you trust the opinion of a reviewer who listens in a room which is randomly different from your own listening environment? Some reviewers do not have an extensive and eclectic music collection to broaden their musical perspectives. They have their favorite cuts that they listen to again and again to evaluate a component. Can you ever hear their favorite cuts the way they hear them? Very few reviewers have a reference system with which all else can be compared. The audio press is more oriented to comparing one thing with another using short-term A-B listening without any point of reference. They talk in terms of differences as if these differences are a justification for thinking that something is actually better than something else. How can they possibly tell what’s actually better for you with so many variables involved in their evaluation methods?
This never ending cycle of short term listening to specific components without a point of reference for the purpose of writing the next review should not have logically achieved any momentum in the audio world. The audio press, however, has managed to create their own aura of expertise by inventing a language to describe hi fi phenomena: sound stage, depth, focus, detail, and slam. These are hi fi terms, not music terms. Consequently, many of the systems and the components which seem to be preferred by the review press embody these hi fi qualities while giving little or no attention to the essential quality that is fundamental to a satisfying music listening experience — natural musical tonal balance.
I have heard many systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars with individual components that have all received rave reviews that sound excruciatingly bad musically. Simple, basic, reasonably priced systems actually can sound musically superior to these out-of-balance mega-systems. Fifty or 60 years ago, the simple systems of the day might not have been able to reproduce the last measure of the low-level information, dynamic range, or symphonic scale of music heard live, but they universally delivered musical enjoyment. Regardless of the price tag, good hi fi systems today should deliver it all: powerful and very revealing and compelling music listening experiences that are capable of suspending your belief that you are listening to a hi fi. What the audio press typically provides for advice, however, makes it almost impossible to know how to put together a system and create a listening environment that is truly capable of delivering musical magic.
If you are shopping for a single component, making a purchase decision based upon an audio review also doesn’t necessarily help you feel good about your investment if you find out, for example, several months down the road that the reviewer has found a “new and better” (read as ”different”) component to write about. It also doesn’t help you feel good about your investment if the component doesn’t really give you the experience you are looking for in your system.
Unfortunately, audio journal hi fi language and the hi fi sound that it represents have permeated all aspects of our industry: audio shows, manufacturing, retail outlets, and consumer preferences. Consequently, no single source of information is reliable if your goal is to create musical magic in your home.
Some audio manufacturers actually design components specifically to reflect audio reviewer hi fi standards to increase the likelihood of getting a favorable review.
Beware also of so-called audio experts who pride themselves in being able to create a perfect mix of components that offset each other’s weaknesses and strengths. Many of them have been unduly influenced by the press and the hi fi standards they embrace. The fault with this approach is that once something is lost in a signal path, it is never truly regained, and once something is added to the signal path, it alters the performance of every other component so that it no longer performs as the manufacturer intended. These compensating systems tend to sound tonally stripped of musical foundation. The search for perfection becomes all about hearing more details and hearing an artificially deep and expansive sound field (created by choosing system components and room set ups that depress mid and lower frequencies). The hi fi sound presentation of these systems may be initially appealing, but the human ear can’t be fooled about the natural sound of music over the long term. We are born with all the faculties required to differentiate between what is real and what is a loose facsimile. If your underlying mission is to bring your home listening experiences closer to hearing music played live, there are plenty of great options to explore regardless of your budget or musical tastes.
In a future thread, we will discuss further why live, unamplified music played in a natural acoustic environment should be the gold standard for evaluating sound regardless of your music preferences and why long-term listening is really the only way to evaluate a system change.