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.
The joys of mid-fi
What I’m writing about here applies to classical music but might have parallels in other music too. I’ve brought this topiic up in different ways before.
Years ago when I was blissfully ensconced in mif-fi, I could easily compare different performances of the same classical work with the confidence that the sound quality would be essentially the same. There would be no issues of soundstaging, detail, et al that would make it hard for me to compare. It was easy to judge a performance on its own merits without complicating factors. Now, it’s almost impossible to assess a performance without placing SQ into the mix. A mediocre recording might be extremely attractive due the sound alone, Conversely, a very good performance might be shunted aside as “unlistenable.”
Oh, for the good old days of mid-fi! 😁
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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.
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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. |
Yes, @ghdprentice , but I have a little bit of an idea of what gear your system is put together with, and I can only think that it must reproduce quite a bit of sonic detail. How do you feel about listening to subpar source material (be it CDs or LPs) via your system? |
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