It would appear to come down to this: a hifi system either reproduces music satisfactorily, or it does not! If it does not, then, plainly it is not hifi, or anything even approaching it.
I don't even pretend to think that all equipment that rates "hifi" sounds the same. It doesn't. In an ideal world, of course, it would, because it would be reproducing the sound from the media with
high fidelity, ie,
truth. In the same ideal world, that media would also be true to the original performance. Doubtless, there are engineers who try to achieve this ideal, rather than aiming to blast teenage ears with loudness. It is probably also equally valid to include the mixing desk as part of the creative process, and part of creating what musicians want to be heard: it is still fidelity to the artistic intention, if not to the exact sounds as played on the instruments.
So, when this medium reaches our houses, the music is going to sound different, according to every factor from what the medium actually is to the pieces of equipment used in its reproduction and the acoustics of the room in which it is played. Oh, and the listener's ears; that should be obvious, but it is easy to forget.
According to
the link previously givenWhat? No pace? No
rhythmic stability? Well, apparently not.
Although some are more or less familiar with the sound of real musical instruments, there cannot be many recordings in our collections where we were actually present at the performance. Therefore, we are not actually in a position to assess the
fidelity of the recording or its reproduction on our equipment.
We certainly can differentiate between, say, equipment-chain-a and equipment-chain-b down to a level of detail (eg being able to hear more of a plucked string from pluck through to decay, no doubt to to different frequency response and dynamic range) and certainly, all of these details contribute to the overall listening experience --- but do we need the language of the overblown amateur wine taster to describe this? Do we need to talk in
pseudo-technical terms about something that is either technically describable, or subjective.
As I think about these things (And I probably wouldn't have thought very much about them if I hadn't joined this forum
) I am coming to think that, over and above the practical plucked-string stuff, people have individual preference for different flavours of sound (flavour? Have I broken my own rule here?
). We do not know what the original performance sounded like, but we know what we like it to sound like when we play it. For example...
Science and Subjectivism in Audio
:lol: I love the idea of a
niceness knob!
Call me an arm-chair cynic, by all means, but it seems that the author of this piece builds amplifiers.
