Do You Love Music or Do You Love Hi-Fi?

Tubegroover,

I agree some people overlook the rooms contribution but it is not feasable to move to a better room or improve the room in some cases. It is possible to improve a sub optimal rooms sound by changing your gear to suit the room. That does not necessarily mean they need more expensive gear just more appropriate gear for their room.

Unfortunately it is hard to tell what gear is right without some trial and error. But it is possible to get great sound in a lesser room if you choose well. Will it be as good as a good system in a good room? No, but some people do not have that option.

Sean

I love HiFi. There. I said it. I also love music, but not enough to listen to much of it when I don't have a good HiFi.

I listen to music at home and to talk radio in the car. I guess the HiFi has something to do with it. Music is just not as engrossing in the car.

I think I love hifi because it gets me closer to the music/musicians. That feeling, on some level, of realism - the presence of the musicians etc. I find this connection even more special when listening to musicians who are no longer with us.
Of course it would be nothing without the music itself, but the little cues to realism/presence are what make hifi listening fundamentally different to hearing a tune on the radio.

Getting closer to this palpable presence can become a bit addictive...but if its driven by the enjoyment of music, I can't see anything wrong with that.

Merry Christmas to you too Rok2id.

Hi Sean

As far as the room goes, many will work depending on the type of music. I personally feel the room comes more into play with larger scale music which generally require larger rooms and appropriately larger more costly speakers, at least in my experience. Many speakers require room and space with careful placement to realize their potential, the more transparent and open the sound the more this comes into play. A dedicated large room offers greater options for placement which can be quite critical in optimizing the system and justifying the cost, most rooms give in to compromise and this is the real point. Certainly many speakers are designed with smaller rooms in mind and those that are highly efficient can work well with low powered amplifiers that need not be expensive to give excellent, realistic sound but generally they don't fare well with large scale music as far as I'm concerned. It is the reason i have been with the same speakers for the past 10 years, feeling any meaningful improvement will only come by a different room and being otherwise quite satisfied by their presentation across the board in my space. Yes, the sound might be improved somewhat by better electronics but at this point, in my case having tried many, the diminishing returns aren't worth the expenditure. At some point you hit a wall unless you have broader options. What drew me into this hobby in the first place is the joy of listening to large scale acoustical music with a natural presentation. It is a progressive road because the divide between the real thing and reproduced is quite wide.

I expect that there are more than a few serious music lovers/audiophiles that are into this large scale orchestral music to warrant the expenditure for a room. For a good midrange presentation in a smaller space and the intimate lifelike sound that many like, it can be done relatively inexpensively but a realistic, dynamic presentation of large scale is always going to be compromised in a small space due to too many limitations.