Now I am throwing out an idea to which I hoped for constructive brainstorming. Nrenter discussed the topic seriously, accepting it as an issue worth thinking about, that he had in fact noticed. What I'm talking about is real, not cooked up simply to upset people. Was he correct in his assessment? It boiled down to the social environment. But what if the explanation is simpler: what if his friend's system simply is better at timing, end of story? What if it is not his engineering training which makes his home system ocasionally less musically involving (being again a case of subjective/social environment in Nrenter's eyes), but that his system emphasizes the information at the expense of the musical message (please don't take offense, Nrenter, just possibilities)? Hasn't anyone ever tweaked their favourite piece only to reach a point where suddenly it seems to have lost the magic which prompted us to tweak, while giving us all that extra detail? I know it's happened to me. Many people have noticed as well that music is simply more fun in the car: no friends, no beer here! Whatever the explanation, Nrenter recognized the phenomenon I'm talking about. Drubin highlighted the existence of a writer and a magazine which were in fact devoted to the subject I'm talking about: a magazine which blamed "bad" equipment for the problem. What if it's not bad equipment but, say, synergy problems? If it's simply an issue of capacitance, for instance, wouldn't it be good to know this: that improper design with respect to capacitance is the culprit in systems which time badly? This is what I mean when I say that high-end manufacturers (not all, as I clearly wrote , but some) could learn from listening to lower-end equipment.
Across the pond an entire country/audio community (the British) have been saying since I got into the game in the early '80s that large power supplies damage the timing, or Prat. Now simpy dubbing it "Prat" simply makes the idea "cute" and makes it easy for us to dismiss it as unimportant - this is a form of rhetoric designed to steer us away from this aspect, not focus out attention on it. But I believe, Art Dudley believes, all those Naim and Exposure followers believe, Linnies, horn-speaker fans, to name but a few, that timing is the supreme issue. Anyone who plays an instrument knows that this is the supreme issue, apart from the notes themselves. Perhaps the British were right. Why is it that low-powered tube amps are now sweeping the country? I know that a friend of mine recently tried one of these, and the timing in his expensive sytem leaped forward, and now we sit with bated breath in awe before the musical performances in his basement. His system is high-end, extremely detailed, dynamic and so forth, but the magic is back. This shows that high-end systems can have the magic, but the fact is many simply fail, as his did before the low-powered amp, while we listened for details, playing the same old audiophile records again and again.
Right now audio magazines are always going on about information retrieval of some sort. The more information an item extracts, the better it is (with of course some exceptions). And of course this is related to money. Frankly this approach bores me: there is no genius in building larger and larger power supplies, in building heavier and heavier speaker cabinets, and in charging more and more money to do this. Will a thousand-pound record-player necessarily sound better than a 20 pound record-player, and is this an interesting or ingenious solution? Not at a $20,000 premium. To provide an example of an alternative: the Well Tempered 'table is ingenious, and William Firebaugh deserves all the recognition he gets. Of course if you keep throwing money at a problem - keep thickening the baffle, build exotic cabinets and so on - the information retrieval will improve, but this is an engineering approach to a musical problem. It doesn't work, the problem is not that simple. Thus we are trained to think in this way. But if all audio magazines only considered timing issues, (relegating information - small details - to the background Prat currently occupies) I submit we would now all be aiming for timing in our equipment. As Nrenter suggested, it's in our heads. Since we don't place Prat at the fore-front, we don't think about it, and since we don't think about it, we don't understand why our expensive equipment isn't enthralling (impressive maybe, but not enthralling), and we fiddle endlessly with cabling and so on instead of being entranced as we had had hoped when we spent the money. I know my system is a success when a non-audiophile asks me to play more music. And I know others of you think the same way, though you're keeping silent. I think it's time we think about it. It's been said often enough that the high-end needs an overhaul, that it's on its last legs, ect. Is it too much to ask that there's a good chance that the next multi-grand item I buy is enthralling? Of course our experience and wisdom comes into it, but there is tremendous peer pressure (audio magazines, price, etc.) to go against our instincts and buy that "ultimate" piece. I'm not against the high-end, I'm against unimaginative approaches, and high-end items which are a fraud. Remember, this is a discussion forum. Plato's works were the result of such forums, science advanced because of such discussions (Galileo corresponded with various other famed astronomers to advance science). While we are not all Socrateses (!) or Platos or Galileos, maybe someone reading this forum is, and he designs audio equipment. Any other Nrenters out there want to make a go?
