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The focus and air lie

There always have been some kind of fashion in the way a system sounds and since a few years it seems that more and more people are looking for details, air and pinpoint focus / soundstaging.
There's a lot of components, accessories and speakers designed to fill full that demand... Halcro, dCS, Esoteric, Nordost, BW, GamuT are some examples.

This sound does NOT exist in real life, when you're at a concert the sound is full not airy, the soundstage exist of course but it's definitely not as focused as many of the systems you can hear in the hifi shops, it just fill the room.

To get that focus and air hifi components cheats, it's all in the meds and high meds, a bit less meds, a bit more high meds and you get the details, the air, the focus BUT you loose timbral accuracy, fullness.
It's evident for someone accustomed to unamplified concert that a lot of systems are lean and far from sounding real.

Those systems are also very picky about recordings : good recordings will be ok but everything else will be more difficult...
That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality.

So why does this happened ?

Did audiophiles stopped to listen unamplified music and lost contact with the real thing ?

Is it easier for shops to sell components that sounds so "detailled and impressive" during their 30mins or 1 hour demo ?
ndeslions
shadorne's avatar
shadorne
7,477 posts
 
It would be a bit condescending to suggest that they do not or cannot appreciate music as a result.

Agreed. I feel bad. What do you suggest - should I sell everything and buy a Bose wave radio.... ;-)

Rush had a good song about this "The Trees" - the theme was that the short Maples (Canadians)were jealous of the tall Oaks (Americans) - the proposed solution was a law that all trees were cut to the same height removing the height advanatge of the oaks. (does the forest look better now?)

I propose we pass a noble law and outlaw all Hi-Fi systems that are not Bose or Sony....
thomp9015
79 posts
 
shadorne, using terms like "circular argument" fallaciously hurts whatever point you are trying to make. there is nothing circular in my argument. as i stated before, you argument, if it can be called that, is reductionist. like much reductionist rhetoric (it is more rhetoric than argument), it is also elitist. but to be fair, i think you have simply conflated music appreciation, which is a westernized practice submitted to its characteristic practice of rationalization and objectification, with the love of music, which is a much broader, more universal phenomenon. music appreciation is not a bad thing at all, it just doesn't and cannot add up to the love of an art form. read Kant, Hegel, Schaupenhaur, Nietzsche, Adorno, Cassirer, and Badiou on aesthetics and see if the genuine love of music, which is often spontaneous and, like much that is valuable in life, utterly inexplicable, can be reduced to "appreciation," which is more of a technical term referring to a very specific set of purely objectivistic metrics. Love and passion can only be taught by life itself. Can't buy me love.
thomp9015
79 posts
 
wow, shadorne, no one could do a better job of refuting your argument than your own words.
dpac996's avatar
dpac996
717 posts
 
have you all gone mad? Who cares? Why not just shut up, stop typing and listen to the damen thing that makes you so-called happy?
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,646 posts
 
We're audiophiles! Of course we're mad! Why else would we throw so much time, money and energy into this?

You were expecting???
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