Mid-Fi, Hi-Fi or.....?

I took a friend to CES/The SHOW about 20 years ago. He told me I was crazy spending $50k or more on an audio system. He thought it couldn’t get much better than his $2000 system and he thought he couldn’t hear that well. 
After the 1st room, he had to pick up his jaw off the floor. Now he understood why people spend $$$ for a system. I spent almost $10k on my 2nd audio system in the late 70’s. It sounded very nice for its day, but technology has changed (as well as the increase in prices) but todays systems for the same price you paid 50 years ago sounds much better today.

I have multiple $2000-$5000 systems in my house, which would very nice, especially for background music. But compared to my reference system that cost more than 10x, the sq is much much better in my reference system, we are not talking about a couple % differences, we are talking night and day difference.

BTW: if I take 1 of my $2000 integrated amp and modified it to the hilt, it will never ever get close to my reference preamp/amp that cost 15x more. The modified $2000 amp will still have the same character sound when it was stock.

NAD most definitely is mid as well as your speakers. Like others who’ve commented, HiFi requires spending 50k plus for a separates component type system. But who cares about the label? Why are you asking anyway? If you love your stereo and sonics then it really doesn’t matter what arbitrary label you or somebody else thinks your stereo is.

Buying HiFi equipment brings a whole new set of headaches. To get all of the potential out of the gear, you’ve got to also be willing to go all the way with your room, cables, power conditioning as well. Otherwise why spend the money?

All those guys who have their gear against the front wall and their racks between the speakers look awesome and they’re enjoying their music just as much as somebody that has a dedicated listening room built for the best possible sonics using high end gear.

It’s all relative. Don’t get caught up in a subjective name for your rig, just enjoy what you have...

johnnotkathi

Good to read about NAD/Thiel combination. Feel free to join Us over on the Thiel Owners thread. You will find a few fans and owners of the CS 1.6 loudspeaker.

Happy Listening!

there are a couple of inherent problems with those terms. First, they are subjective. There is not a standard definition, and what sounds really good to you may not do it for me. Second, the terms are relative. Someone who owns $150,000 system may smugly think he has reached the nirvana of "hi-fi". but that system may be in the dreaded category of "mid fi" to the man who owns a half a million dollar system. I've noticed that for a lot of people think anything that costs a little less than what they have bought is mid fi and anything that costs a little more is a waste of money. So, these subjective labels tend to generate more heat than light and more often than not inhibit rather than encourage constructive discussion.

it's not about how much money you have spent on your system or how long it has taken you to put it together. I think it's about taking the money you have that you are willing to put into this hobby and building a system that brings you joy in listening to music. That's a subjective thing and will be different for everybody. There are a lot of knowledgeable people here, and on similar sites that can help you achieve that. But once these labels start getting thrown around, the constructive part of the discussion is generally over. So, as others have said, best to focus on what you can do with the budget you have to build a system that maximizes your enjoyment of the hobby because this is not a contest, it's about how you enjoy the music.

Hifi vs. Midfi vs. Lofi… categorical distinctions that are so subjective as to be more confusing than not; mostly marketing terms in how they’re used. Hifi stands for high fidelity - i.e. gear that will play back music with as little alteration to the mastering as possible - add no sound signature past the digital file, cassette, LP etc. Some nice kit by design is in a technical sense not great for the task of true hifi (again, by the literal meaning of the abbreviation). Much kit marketed as hifi is essentially unverified by real / legitimate testing. Hence hifi being more of a marketing moniker in the real world.

Midfi and lowfi came about as relative descriptors of kit that generally revolves around more widely affordable price points - you don’t tend to see folks talking about these three categories in terms of measurements or experiments with proper sampling, so the previous comments alluding to the terms being a way for market tier-ing and purchase-validating seem fairly accurate to me.

How hifi something is has nothing to do with how enjoyable it is to you. Some folks like a lot of “sound signature” from their kit be it from particular tubes, specific peculiarities of speaker cabinet or baffle design, etc. Believing in hifi is believing the mastering job of all music playback you consume needs zero further alteration in-playback chain (or in-room). Of course, many folks will agree that’s often not ideal.

Technically, how hifi a product is has absolutely zero to do with its cost. If something is expensive and has no available metrics / comparative studies to support its ability for (technically, not subjectively) audibly flawless playback, in today’s day and age, it’s not necessarily hifi despite whatever the price tag may suggest.

Better to consider vintage gear as just that - heritage enjoyment. Plenty of it can play splendid together and can result in Hifun - the far more important abbreviation to pursue in all this, eh!? 😉