Note: This is a special edition of the String Theories newsletter devoted to new and recent writing about home audio. At the top I’m introducing a new series of short articles designed to help music fans think through how they listen at home and how they access and collect music. Below are links to my recent posts on aspects of the subject. I hope you’ll take this journey with me, because I enjoy the rewards of what I’ve learned on a daily basis.
Throughout the great live music drought of 2020, I urged people to raise their consciousness about at-home listening, physical music purchases, and high fidelity audio. When I invested in significant upgrades to my home system in very early 2020, little did I know how much time I’d be spending enjoying recorded music, and it’s one aspect of the lockdown that I found enriching.
With the crisis winding down (god help us), I’ve been reflecting on what I’ve learned about hi-fi sound, from my days as a teenager with Koss headphones to this past year as I’ve lived with my first authentic, if still modest, hi-fi system. Even as we head back to live shows, I want to share some explainers about hi-fi. I watch and read a lot about this field, and I’m frustrated by the gulf in understanding, needs and desires between the industry and the regular music consumer.
Audiophiles have a compromised reputation, sometimes for good reasons. The field/lifestyle/hobby can be exclusionary, obsessive and snooty. For me though, appreciation of music and sound requires cultivating a healthy perspective about gear, money and standards. I hope to define what that looks like to me.
I have to say the world of audio is humbling and more vast than you’d suspect. This is a world of crazy smart people, elegant engineering, and advanced conceptual thinking - one that leads over time to a greater closeness to music itself. Fully realized, that means more than knowing about a lot of songs, tunes, albums or artists. It’s about feeling the entire sonic intent of composers and musicians. Through that we listeners find a path to fulfillment, growth, intellectual satisfaction, mental health, connection and spiritual elevation. Pretty good deal.
If you’ve been mystified or put off by “audiophile” talk in the past, I offer an alternative. I’m not an industry-approved expert, which I think helps widen and sharpen my perspective. I’ve studied hi-fi as a fan, enthusiast and journalist/reporter. I can tell you that 97% of what you’d read in Stereophile magazine or on WhatHiFi.com is not important to the music fan, unless you’re into following gear and audio tech for their own sake, which is cool, but decidedly optional on the path to aural enlightenment.
What I’ve tried to do is distill the insights of the three percent that’s helped me become a more sensitive, discerning and emotionally engaged listener. I’d like to save you a lot of time on your way to one of life’s sublime gifts - any music you want to hear, vivid and lifelike, at home, on demand. Listening at home has its own advantages; there’s no time limit, no ticket price, no transportation, no dinner out beforehand, and a limitless choice of program. So if we can and will listen at home, I think people should make it a life practice worthy of great musicians and the art of recording. It’s one of the greatest privileges of modernity and worth an investment.
Posts will appear in random order, but I’m aiming to address:
What’s the object of hi-fi? (included here)
What do you need?
What should you spend?
Your listening space
Being savvy about digital music
Below are links to posts about vinyl listening and how to approach the streaming platforms. Let me know what you’d like to read about. Please shoot me questions or prompts: chavighurst@gmail.com
Why Hi-Fi?
An audiophile’s goals.
It’s right in the name, and what a beautiful word it is. Fidelity. We admire and strive for fidelity in marriages, friendships and our contracts with people. Fidelity makes me think of dogs and patriotism - and of music and sound. Fidelity in reproduction is good. High fidelity is better, and how high is anybody’s guess. These hi-fi people have created something pretty weird and uncanny over the past century. That thing is to transport sound waves from one place and occasion across time and space so they can be accurately reconstituted in your private space at will. It goes further, creating an aural illusion of three dimensionality and hyper-reality. Hi-fi can more or less hack your brain, triggering unconscious sensory perceptions that literally re-mind you of how instruments sound naturally in a room. The effect should be intense, dramatic and a bit magical. The loudspeakers are said to “disappear” when all is working properly. The instruments are convincingly arrayed in the room’s physical space. Once you achieve that “threshold of authenticity,” to quote a friend’s coinage, you’ve achieved your goals without having to become a full-blown, big-spending hi-fi connoisseur.
It’s smart to break down a few broad things audiophiles seek out because isolating specific qualities is a vital part of listening critically. I see three criteria for what makes high fidelity worthy of that name.
1. We want to hear a wide, deep and tall impression of sound made in three dimensional space. The mind’s ear experiences the instruments as localized on what we call a soundstage. I love the term because it’s so evocative and plain in meaning.
2) As a corollary, we crave the sensation that the instruments and vocalists are distinct from one another, not blurred together but clearly defined, as if with edges. Both 1 and 2 stem from how stereo sound takes advantage of our binaural hearing. We have two ears and a brain that processes two signals into one impression of sonic space. Home theater with five or seven or more speakers surrounding you is its own thing and for me not worth the cost and struggles to get it just right. We’ll be talking here about two-channel stereo sound systems only, because two is all you really need.
3) Additionally, we ask that those instruments and voices come across as true in timbre, that the piano sounds like that piano in that room. We listen for cymbals (quite hard to reproduce) that sound like cymbals in real life. We want the voices of Ella Fitzgerald or Beverly Sills or Melody Gardot to sound as if we’re sharing space them. This depends on all the links in your audio chain, from source to amplifier to speakers. Deviation from or degradation of that original signal, through audio compression or poor matching of gear or any number of other factors, is often called “coloration” or “distortion.” There are acceptable and even desirable versions of both, but they are perilous and subtle.
As I write this, I’m in my listening spot with McCoy Tyner playing piano in a duo from 1993 with vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. While I have of course heard better and more expensive stereo systems, this, to me, is authentically high fidelity. In what way?
On this beautifully swinging piano/vibes recording (coming from a high resolution stream on Tidal), Tyner’s piano is on the left, and I can tell that he’s facing me, because his bass notes are toward the center of the soundstage, and as he plays higher, the notes emerge farther to the left. The vibes sound similarly arrayed to Tyner’s right. Both instruments seem to occupy the space they did during the recording session, when the width and depth of the musical image was determined by the recording engineers and producers at the time. But even more important is that true tone of the instruments - the hammer strikes and overtone-rich decays of the piano - the fruity glassy and round tones of the vibes, which happens to be one of my favorite sounds.
Favorite instruments, timbres and sounds, should be top of mind as you audition and experiment with hi-fi components. Besides vibes (and piano), I crave realism from the sounds of the upright acoustic bass, undistorted electric guitar and drums kits. In fact just about any percussion instrument thrills me when heard in person or on hi-fi, whereas drums on a car stereo or a boombox are vividly ignorable. On this album, Hutcherson is now playing the marimba, also in the xylophone family with the vibes, but made of wood instead of metal. And that specific timbral difference is demonstrated vividly by a good hi-fi system.
Coming soon, what you actually need and what kind of investment is appropriate?
RECENT POSTS FROM THE STRING THEORIES JOURNAL
These articles take deeper dives into key areas of hi-fi, including the retail experience, the thrills of vinyl on a good turntable, streaming music best practices and headphones. Each includes the header and first graphs only. Click on the image to link to the whole article.