Funny Hi-Fi quote

[wicked1]

I was reading an interview w/ Radiohead. They released an album online before it hit the stores, and let people pay whatever they wanted for it. Some people complained because the quality of the mp3's was relatively low.
Then someone in Radiohead says,

"Hi-fi really annoys me. hi-fi is just about middle-aged man trying to make music sound as good as it did when they were teenagers, and it never will. They'll never be as excited as they were when they first heard that music coming out of just one speaker." Then the person who said that sheepishly smiles, and it comes out that they have a really nice hi-fi system and spend a lot of time and money constantly upgrading the system.

It's always good to be able to laugh at yourself.

[nhuwar]

That doesn't surprise me coming from thoose luney tunes

Nick

[dhaen]

He's right that it never will...
But it does have added tinitus now...

[HollowState]

Originally posted by dhaen
He's right that it never will...

I tend to agree. My first Hi-Fi experience occurred when I was a child. I built a rough wooden cabinet for a 12 inch speaker I had found and added another small speaker in parallel through a capacitor. (no math, just a crude two way system). When I connected the speaker cabinet to a wooden Philco table radio I had, I was amazed at the great sound improvement. That first quantum leap in sound quality impressed me more back then, then the megabuck systems I've heard as an adult.

Victor

[jlsem]

"Hi-fi really annoys me. hi-fi is just about middle-aged man trying to make music sound as good as it did when they were teenagers, and it never will. They'll never be as excited as they were when they first heard that music coming out of just one speaker." Then the person who said that sheepishly smiles, and it comes out that they have a really nice hi-fi system and spend a lot of time and money constantly upgrading the system.

Except that myself and many others were , in our youth, listening to those songs on really good hi-fi gear. I remember a lot of good parties with loud rock and roll blaring from my homemade Klipschorns when I was in my late teens. What annoys me about hi-fi is that it never helped me attract pretty girls into my bedroom.

John

[Lowrider]

I dint care how music sounded when I was a teenager, I was always more concerned how the girl I was dancing with, or wanting to dance with, felt...

[Shaun]

Originally posted by HollowState
My first Hi-Fi experience occurred when I was a child. I built a rough wooden cabinet for a 12 inch speaker I had found and added another small speaker in parallel through a capacitor. (no math, just a crude two way system). When I connected the speaker cabinet to a wooden Philco table radio I had, I was amazed at the great sound improvement. That first quantum leap in sound quality impressed me more back then, then the megabuck systems I've heard as an adult.

LOL!

My first speaker (not even that) was 5 (!) Pioneer car speakers wired in parallel, mounted onto a vertical piece of hardboard; no enclosure. This was powered by a Sanyo "3000mW"(!) portable tape player. Today I know why it sounded so good, and marvel at the Sanyo's ability to drive that load.

[Dennis5587]

I'm 20... does that mean I don't belong in here?

I like Hi-Fi, because it can better emulate the concerts that I currently still go to .

[despotic931]

im 22, I think that there are more of us "youngins" than many people think...

[Miles Prower]

"Hi-fi really annoys me. hi-fi is just about middle-aged man trying to make music sound as good as it did when they were teenagers, and it never will. They'll never be as excited as they were when they first heard that music coming out of just one speaker."

He's 100% right about that, but it doesn't have very much to do with nostalgic old farts trying to relive their glory days. As with everything else, it's not any one thing, but an unfortunate synergy of different factors. In a great many ways, solid state and digital have been gigantic steps backwards where sonic performance is concerned. A lot of this equipment naturally sounds lousey. But that's what the majority of the music-buying public uses, and they would never recognize good sound because they've never heard it. So the sound engineers try to compensate for equipment deficiencies when they master the studio recordings. With digital tech, the possibilities have become quite endless, almost to the point where you hardly need musicians at all, and playing those recordings on equipment like we design and build lets every sonic defect come through, loud and clear.

I'm still amazed at just how bad a downloaded mp3, or a store-bought CD for that matter, can sound when played through a VT amp that simply gets out of the way. All those unintentional and engineered defects come through, loud and clear. Doesn't do any good to have folks hear that and wonder why the amp sounds so when it isn't the amp, but the recording! But guess where they lay the blame?

Here's a whole article about this very thing: The Death of High Fidelity. Six pages' worth. Read 'em and weep.