Fidelity to what? Or what are we tying to achieve with all our expensive gear?
This post is in response to a letter published in the January edition of Hi-Fi World magazine, which has got me thinking.
I’m not sure of the copyright situation, so I’ll only quote the salient points of the letter. Should the Moderators require my quotes be pulled, the full letter can be found on page 55 under the title ‘Bring me closer’:
"…the advertising strapline for Quad equipment used to be “the closest approach to the original sound”. But personally, I don’t think that is what hi-fi is all about at all.
….. it is arguable that we don’t want the original sound. The whole point about attending a live concert is to get the excitement of a live show. This is partly based on seeing rather than just hearing the musicians, and partly on the effort one has had to make to get there – I think we derive pleasure from the experience in proportion to the effort we put in to achieve it.
….
So I would argue that the job of a hi-fi system is to give the listener an enjoyable home listening experience, in terms of offering only a facsimile of one take on the original sound, less the extraneous factors which spoil a live concert. In particular, I think that a hi-fi system needs if possible to offer not the same, but more excitement and presence than the original, to compensate for everything that is missing when one listens at home. ……"
Now clearly the author, not being a member of AoS, cannot defend himself in this forum so I will be conciliatory in my comments. First of all I do understand what he means by the futility of faithfully recreating the experience of attending a live concert: there is not a system anywhere in the world today that comes close to doing that.
All a sound system can do is be sufficiently good in dealing with those aspects of sound reproduction that are important to you. No system can do it all; that is why we all use different equipment, because we all have a different agenda.
My complaint is that the reproduction of live un-amplified instruments is the only source of comparison we have, to make sure we are on the right track. How do you know where to stop in making the home presentation have ‘more excitement and presence than the original'? Clearly no one wants a sound system that is unpleasant to listen to or is un-involving (that is, does no engage the listener), but where is the fidelity or value in simply producing a ‘nice sound’? Concepts of emotional involvement are of little help here, since I can be moved by hearing something on a small portable radio or played on a cheap ‘Dansett’ record player.
No, I’ll stick with my system and approach which does what the author of the letter claims it should do in the first sentence of the last paragraph quoted, and eschew everything that follows in the second sentence.
Well that’s my take, what do other members want to achieve from their systems?
Regards