Fidelity

Thank you. I appreciate your answers.Reubent: I like your advice. I do enjoy myself. My connection to music has always been emotional and so I do not make much headway with any analysis of my system.However, I do find audio related subjects really interesting, even if my understanding is a bit limited.Bright star audio: This is where I always get hung up! I do like my system the way it sounds now but I know it adds its own sound to the recording. Warmth, mostly. I think often that my ears are too easily appeased- a little lazy.

Let me rephrase that...

The holy grail of hi-fi is to recreate the recording engineers interpretation of the performance in your living room as acurate as possible.

Hi Tim,

I'm sure many of us neurotic audiophiles here (myself included) are envious of you that you can just sit back and enjoy the music that comes out of your system without dwelling too much on what the system does do versus what it doesn't do.

As a manufacturer in the high end sector (vibration control products and loudspeakers) I see it as my duty to push the envelope of what an audio system is able to achieve and my comments on audio forums reflect a sensibility that an uncompromising attitude is required to do so.

Tim said:
"I do like my system the way it sounds now but I know it adds its own sound to the recording."

At the present state of the art ALL audio components (and therefore systems) either take away or add to the signal captured in the recording (and probably some of both). I believe that we can only move steadily forward toward perfect audio reproduction by ensuring that our systems (the individual components, accessories we use and set up procedures) do not alter the signal captured in the recording. It is sometimes a difficult doctrine for many people to apply because the effects of coloration are beguiling and seductive.

I do believe that we should enjoy the music that comes out of our systems (otherwise what is the point?) but I also believe that same type of emotional fulfillment we experience when listening to live music can only be consistently replicated in the home when the system is not making its own contribution the signal it is reproducing.

Best Regards,

Barry Kohan

Just to reiterate a stance that I've personally had for years, as I've been around high end audio as long, is that high fidelity is most challenged in the home environment in the area of "dynamic transparancy". Otherwise, "high fidelity", at least refering to musical accuracy and refinement regarding detail, coloration(or lack there of), soundstage, purity, musicality and such, is stops with DYNAMICS!!!
To me, this is where most audiophile systems fall short, i not the entire home audio market mostly!
I take that back, speakers like some of the better active audiphile offerings out there (excluding Meridian IMO), Avantgarde horns, and similar come much much closer to realism, accuracy, and dynamic REALITY than most!...with the likes of Wilson WATT Puppies a close trailing..

I am imagining how the words high fidelity were first used to describe a genre of audiophilia...

In 1928, group of golden earred audiophiles listening to a bunch of stereos, a lot of A/B/A/B/C/B/A comparisons going on...

And, one system seemed to be heads and shoulders above all the rest... and people started making comments like, "the parts and build quality is built with integrety, and the resulting sound is honest and faithful to the original..."

Well, you get the emotive use of words that are synonomous to "fidelity" thus the rampant use of hi-fi...

Ofcourse, like any emotive use of verbage, it's all relative (the meaning) to the person using it. Definitely a slippery slope if one has to analyze what's going on.