Fidelity to what? Or what are we tying to achieve with all our expensive gear?

[tannoyman]

Can we achieve the potency of real sound? No, but there are some baselines I do strive for and that give me great satisfaction when listening to music (e.g. studio albums, for which there is no baseline):

1. the system must be dynamically competent and honest. I don't want my sound rounded or warmed up. A brass instrument played close is an incredible thing and can sound quite dirty. I want it to sound that way on my system. Drums need to have attack and not be limp.

2. the system's tonality must be neutral. I know what a live piano sounds like and it's not easy to achieve realism. Remember it's a percussion instrument and the 'strike' has to sound that way.

3. human voice is very important to me. I don't want males to sound plummy or females to sound shrieky. Spoken voice on BBC R4 is a great test of a system's overall competence.

I do try to achieve truth to concert sound for classical music, although it will at its best only be a good attempt. As for live rock sound, that is not a baseline I use since most gigs sound awful.

Do I enjoy the sound my system makes? Definitely, and my focus these days is on buying more music.

Hi Martin

Thank you for a superb contribution to this thread. I totally agree with your thoughts on this but I would a few additional points.

Firstly many hi fi systems tend to exagerate and make sounds larger than life. This a problem because invariably they do not do so consistently. So on certain types of music or records they sound superb but on others they sound awful. One of the main things I look for is evenhandedness - the ability to handle all types of music with grace and make them sound acceptable. I do not not listen to very much rock music but when I do I want it to sound reasonable so I use rock music as part of my change evaluation.

For most of my 44 years as an enthusiast I have had records or sometimes whole swathes of records that I could not listen to. Many people say its the record that's at fault. Some even go as far as to dispose of the offending disc. In my experience it is usually not the record but the system that is at fault. I have had records that which I have owned for years but never played because they sounded absolutely awful. Years later when my system was better sorted I have found the same records to be superb and among the best recordings I own.

I now judge system progess not by its impact on my favourite records but on its effect across my whole collection. This of course takes time. You cannot assess a change in a few minutes it can take weeks before you really know. However when I now come to a conclusion it usually stands the test of time rather than being proved false within a short time. Probably the most important thing I have learned over the years is that whilst we all like to consider ourselves good judges of sound quality (according to our own standards of course) short term memory of sounds is very poor and the ear is easily fooled. This if we are not careful makes us cannon fodder for the many charlatans who swim in the hi fi pond! Caveat emptor has never been more appropriate than in the wonderful world of audio.

PS I am just going to adjust my Peter Belt rings and do my weekly check to make sure than the slots in my crew heads are all aligned to the 12 O'clock position

David