The joys of mid-fi

I totally agree; bad recordings can certainly diminish the pleasure of good performances.  On the other hand, good recordings don't improve bad performance, they just make the bad performance more obvious.  But oh my, when you couple excellent performance with a high quality recording, played on a nice system, you have it all.  Maybe the payoff is worth the trouble.

Some "music lovers" will be critical of this view.  Some seem to be able to appreciate the underlying music, regardless of the quality of the reproduction.  

Where does mid-fi end and hi-fi begin?  What one man or woman sees as hi-fi is only mid-fi (at best) to another.

A great topic!

Art Dudley included the subject of the ability of superior hi-fi components to afford the listener deeper access into the musical performances contained in recordings, irrespective of the "sound" of the recordings and/or component(s). He held that it was a matter of the ability of the component/system to "play the music", an ability separate from the quality of the "sound" of same.

Listening to a hi-fi tends to raise our expectations. I don’t expect a car CD player to make music sound "good", so when it doesn’t I’m not disappointed.

You bring up a good question. For me the answer lies in what kind of system have you built and are you listening to the system or the performance. For much of my history I was driven by my ability to analyze and hear more detail and nuance… in the sounds, images, soundstage, etc. The result was that it emphasized details and the venue and lost the gestalt and musicality which drew me in to the performance.

So, as I pointed out in other posts, with season ticket to the symphony for a decade I compared my system to the real thing and changed my system over time to be natural and musical. The music draws me in now instead of sticking out in my face. Different performances stand out, not by how they were recorded, but how they were performed. Much of today equipment is designed around detail and slam, making a sonic spectacular to wow the listener but failing to reproduce the musical experience.

To me a truly high end (audiophile) system reproduces the musical experience and sucks you in to the performance. It doesn’t make background instruments into solo performances and tell you all about the venue and mastering unless there was something very wrong with them. There are a number of companies working to produce equipment to do this like Sonus Faber, Conrad Johnson, Audio Research and VAC.