Fidelity

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.

I'll go with Reubant to block, Bob. He said it plain and simple...get out while you still can, ignore these neurotic freaks, and enjoy the music! Be happy. The idea of an objective anything is patently ridiculous. Our senses are as individual as our fingerprints. One man's green is another man's chartreuse, One woman's High-C is another's orange-flavored beverage. What sounds good to you is not necessarily what sounds good to Stereophile...well, I guess most components sound pretty darn good to Stereophile so that statement may be inaccurate. You get the point though. Use your own senses. Trust the force Luke. Or, if you're blessed like at least one of our illustrious audio manufacturers, perhaps God will point out the right gear for you. High fidelity?! What a pile of horse X-cream-mint! True to what? A black and white world? But they can measure it, with scientific accuracy that is unimpeachable...why just look at the sine-waves, and those swell three-dimensional plotted curves like desert sands...and the experts all tell me that I can't get any better without spending ten times the price! Yet there's a whole derriere-burstin' load of "Audiophiles" and Audio-critics, myself among them, who adore the sound of tubes and SET amplification, complete with distortion to write home about that you can measure with a yard-stick. We are charmed and will not be swayed by geeks waving scientific evidence in abundance to discredit our ears and enlighten the rest of the world of the error in our ways. And yet I can also hear the appeal of my good friends craving for the detail and slam of his high-dollar SS rig, which renders so much detail you can hear snow falling on the roof of the recording studio. The more you focus on the specific qualities that the gear has, what it imparts, or does not, the further and further away you will tend to get from the music that moves you enough to pursue such a thing in the first place. Don't let that happen. Run, while you still have your pants. I'm telling you, these guys will take'em and have you wearing cryo'd jock-straps that isolate each of your balls in a cushion of air to eek out that last bit of performance from each of them in the name of truth and accuracy. Meanwhile they'll sell your pants on eBay after they've cleaned out your wallet, and have you begging for more because you can't get it up now unless you have the very latest, greatest, biggest, bestest, badassest device out there that you can brag about right here and enlighten other poor gullible slobs like you once were, convincing them you know what they'll like the best cause you've heard it all and you are enlightened. Oh the horror of it all!

Marco

"The holy grail of hi-fi is to recreate the recording engineers interpretation of the performance in your living room as acurate as possible."
That's a good definition on hi-fi, but not one I care to follow (anymore). I've done some recording in my live, whether in the studio ot be it life, and found that real hi-fi doesn't exist. Even if equipment gets better over the years, it is not possible to recreate a concert-hall in a small livingroom (IMHO). So I gave up on all that, and now enjoy the music. It save's a lot of worrying, although not on money - what I save on equipment I spend on music!!

I agree with Marco, if your enjoying the music and it sounds good to you then leave it alone. The most important thing is to enjoy the music. I've been all over the place with my system over the last 20+ years. I'll get it "dailed in" and sounding good then catch a bad case of the upgrade bug and change something. Then I screw up the senergy and end up changing things big time to get it back to where I had it. Over the years I've spent more on my stereo than on my house.Right now I have it sounding good and I find myself making excuses to listen to it. In addition, I've been ignoring my chores around the house. When the system sounds good I spend a lot more time sitting in front of it and reading which is a good thing.

Marco,

I have an appointment on Wednesday for an ultrasound of my sack to get fitted with my cryoed jockstrap with the teflon and air dialectic. I'll let you know how the system sounds after the upgrade.