I'm old enough to remember the big Hi-Fi stores of the 1970s and 1980s, indeed bought my first stereo systems in places like Tech HiFi, etc., before I started designing and building my own gear. What I also remember is banks of speakers, amplifiers, and sources of various sorts. None of which on the face of it, even within a given (and not extremely modest) price point sounded very much like each other. The largest differences I observed were with speakers, turntables, and tape decks. Amplifiers and pre-amplifiers were generally not that different, but sometimes even in casual listening did not sound identical.
I hope you are getting the point, all of these components were the product of large electronics conglomerates and were designed by competent engineers and built in efficient manufacturing facilities with good quality control. Fully tested and meeting at least the IHF/FTC/DIN requirements to be categorized as HiFi.
I've never heard two systems put together by any two people that sounded absolutely identical even in very similar rooms with very similar budgets and very similar system configurations unless exactly the same set of components was used across the board.
I guess one might argue that there is no Hi Fi and that is is all about someone's preferences or limitations imposed by the technology and/or budget.
Many of them however were much more consistent than some of the more unfortunate diy efforts I have heard, including a few of mine.. lol
I hope you are getting the point, all of these components were the product of large electronics conglomerates and were designed by competent engineers and built in efficient manufacturing facilities with good quality control. Fully tested and meeting at least the IHF/FTC/DIN requirements to be categorized as HiFi.
I've never heard two systems put together by any two people that sounded absolutely identical even in very similar rooms with very similar budgets and very similar system configurations unless exactly the same set of components was used across the board.
I guess one might argue that there is no Hi Fi and that is is all about someone's preferences or limitations imposed by the technology and/or budget.
Many of them however were much more consistent than some of the more unfortunate diy efforts I have heard, including a few of mine.. lol
That output is an electrical signal, so, not a sound at all. It only gets turned into a sound when played through the monitor loudspeakers by the mix engineer. And those speakers, inevitably, have their own colourations and distortions and dispersion characteristics. So, in a sense, we have no original reference sound - only a reference electrical (audio) signal!
I think this was the idea if you go back about ninety or a hundred years to the very infancy of electronics. The goal was to reproduce exactly what the microphones heard.
But by 1950 that goal was already shattered, because we already had reel-to-reel tape machines, tape edits with razor blades, canned laughter added to comedy routines, and so on.
Go to about 2:35 minutes into this clip of Zac Efron and Taylor Swift on the Ellen show, and you can hear what Taylor Swift's singing sounds like without Autotune / Melodyne / Pro Tools and a bunch of other electronic trickery. Also without Zac Efron's voice covering up her vocal problems.
Swift's singing is weak and wavery, and her pitch is really bad. And this is one of the most successful "singers" of recent times.
(Zac Efron is quite a good singer, though!)
Here goes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8kCTPPwfpM
-Gnobuddy
Same here. When you look closer, three (speakers, turntables, tape decks) are minefields of compromises and technical limitations. Tape-deck frequency response, for example, depends on a host of things, including precise tape head alignment, and numerous RC time-constants in the NAB equalization.
At one time I worked for an audio company that made near-field monitors for audio mixing. We had a listening room, populated with one or more pairs of competing speakers from various other manufacturers. Even when set up with identical (measured) SPL, no two speakers (of different models) ever sounded identical over the entire frequency range. Sometimes the entire tweeter range would sound virtually identical, though, when comparing some of the most neutral-sounding speakers.
I've only heard differences when there was either a loudness mismatch (one amp louder), or intentional EQ of some sort built into one (or both) amps.
There is also no such thing as a mathematical point (position without area) in practice. But for some reason, we don't have thousands of people obsessing about the lack of perfect points! 😀
I've heard people listening with great satisfaction to some truly horrible-sounding systems. The ear can become accustomed to almost anything - the human brain is very adaptable, and after a few days of listening, the "fullrange" one-inch drivers in your computer speakers start to sound "normal".
Related story: I once worked in a lab with a powerful infrared laser. We put on brilliant blue (infrared blocking) safety goggles before entering the lab, so that the invisible laser beam didn't accidentally blind you.
When you put the goggles on, the whole world turned bizarrely blue. Then you entered the lab, worked for three or four hours, and finally emerged for lunch and took off the goggles.
And then the whole world turned bizarrely red for a while - your brain had adapted to the blue goggles during the hours you'd been wearing them!
This automatic adaptation process was so complete that I once emerged from a long day in the lab, rushed to my car, and dashed off to a dinner party I was late for. It was only when I got to the party that I realized that I was still wearing my bright blue infra-red safety goggles! I had had no perception at all that the entire world had been tinted bright blue ever since I'd put on the goggles hours before.
-Gnobuddy
I'm back from my annual Royal opera house tune-up. First thing I am pleased to report is that my system at home is not very high end. I stopped going to hifi shows about 25 years ago, partly as I had no money and mainly because I was fed up being driven from demo rooms because they were too loud and had an awful tipped up, harsh high end. This hatred of high end is probably what drove my current love of Apogee ribbons for 500Hz up in my speakers despite their other shortcomings.
Anyway, real live music is not like that. I know the attenuation with distance helps, but you don't get the grating, jarring sound of what some people take for high end.
Now the perspective is odd, looking down into the orchestra pit, but with eyes closed you can locate all the instruments easily in two dimensions bar (oddly enough) the double basses. There are 6 double basses in the RoH orchestra but it was still hard to hear them.
Second point was levels were not that loud and seemed even quieter. This to me is a hallmark of live acoustic sound. if a home system sounds loud then something is wrong, usually you are playing too loud or the room is causing problems.
But the main take away for me is that it sounded 'natural'. If I could get that soundscape in my living room I would be very happy. Of course commercial recordings would never put the microphones in the position I was in, but I liked the perspective. Interestingly if you looked up from the orchestra at the stage (the bit you were supposed to be looking at), the soundscape changed considerably. This is not suprising when the direct sound is coming from 35 degrees down but the effect was intriguing as you lost a lot of the depth perspective but gained height as if the instruments were 60 ft high. I suspect this is due to reflections but as was the first time I had observed this I just rolled with the illusion and enjoyed the feeling of space it gave.
There were about 6 fill in speakers aimed into the boxes. Pretty sure they were not at a level where I could hear them above the orchestra direct sound and may not have been active as I couldn't see any microphones down in the pit.
A pleasant experience despite the slackers of the RMT being on strike. And I still have no wish to visit a hifi show 🙂. But next time I go will sneak in my SPL meter.
Anyway, real live music is not like that. I know the attenuation with distance helps, but you don't get the grating, jarring sound of what some people take for high end.
Now the perspective is odd, looking down into the orchestra pit, but with eyes closed you can locate all the instruments easily in two dimensions bar (oddly enough) the double basses. There are 6 double basses in the RoH orchestra but it was still hard to hear them.
Second point was levels were not that loud and seemed even quieter. This to me is a hallmark of live acoustic sound. if a home system sounds loud then something is wrong, usually you are playing too loud or the room is causing problems.
But the main take away for me is that it sounded 'natural'. If I could get that soundscape in my living room I would be very happy. Of course commercial recordings would never put the microphones in the position I was in, but I liked the perspective. Interestingly if you looked up from the orchestra at the stage (the bit you were supposed to be looking at), the soundscape changed considerably. This is not suprising when the direct sound is coming from 35 degrees down but the effect was intriguing as you lost a lot of the depth perspective but gained height as if the instruments were 60 ft high. I suspect this is due to reflections but as was the first time I had observed this I just rolled with the illusion and enjoyed the feeling of space it gave.
There were about 6 fill in speakers aimed into the boxes. Pretty sure they were not at a level where I could hear them above the orchestra direct sound and may not have been active as I couldn't see any microphones down in the pit.
A pleasant experience despite the slackers of the RMT being on strike. And I still have no wish to visit a hifi show 🙂. But next time I go will sneak in my SPL meter.
Hi Bill,
Nice write-up just after concert when it's all fresh in the mind.
Yes I too find concert sound to be "natural" and not loud. Yet, it certainly fills the hall.
Our rooms at home are just so much smaller that the sound just gets so loud, so quickly.
I once read that a proper judge of a music system is how low in volume you can go and still hear everything. And I tend to agree with that.
Interesting point on the low volume. I used to think like you and remember auditioning some ATC SCM-10s when they first came out. In the end I decided against them because the infinity modulus were sexier looking and didn't need to go as loud to sound good. Wind on 20 years and I started to think that actually the reasons were probably due to differences in the power response. Given how audiophiles eschew loudness controls of any sort a speaker that is truly flat will sound thin when the volume is turned down. I really ought to persue that idea further, but as I don't have both sets of speakers to hand not a lot I can do other than try and work out if the measured limitations of the speakers I do have on hand correlate with the experience.
Well I rather like DF's definition as it is what I always took the meaning of the term HiFi, or High Fidelity, to be, and a little google and wiki lookup confirmed that. I don't think there is any reason for a redefinition at all as a general definition.
However as a practical application as to what constitutes hifi, well that is something else. DF has only given us a couple of parameters, 20-20k hz. frequency response, a THD number somewhere below 1%, "the tests", and Moir's paper(s) from the 60's.
This is all from back when sources were LP records in mono or stereo, electronics were made with tubes, and speakers that all had paper coned drivers.
Everything has changed considerably in the past 50 years. We now have music sources that can give full dynamic range, more accurate electronics, and speaker drivers made of many different materials giving more accurate sound transmission.
Yet even with all the improvements, hifi still lacks that sense of realism of a concert hall experience.
As Bill has just posted, "concert sound is so natural". Home playback still doesn't quite have that.
Except for speakers, DACs, preamps and amps I've compared in level matched double blind listening, sounded indistinguishable unless something is intentionally designed to color the sound or malfunctioning.
There is hi fi in DACs, preamps, amps and cables.
The monitors used in mixing are some of the most neutral sounding speakers and for good reason. It's up to the engineer's talent to produce the re-playable medium that closely matches the recorded sound. The role of the end user's hi fi equipment is to play that medium audibly identical way.
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Except for NS-10s and their ilk, which aren't...
(aside if I had room for soffit mounted ATCs at home they would be my dream setup).
(aside if I had room for soffit mounted ATCs at home they would be my dream setup).
Nothing in the music playback should disappear with lower volume. I think this has everything to do with the sound threshold, commonly incorrectly called "noise floor" of the music system.
Remember, volume is signal attenuation into the amplifying circuits. Signal attenuation is, or at least should be, linear.
If you have the sense that you have to turn the volume "UP" to hear things, something is not right, and you are likely to never get what to want to hear.
Granted there are a number of factors at work in this.
But I have certainly found it to be true that as I have improved the quality, especially the amplifying circuits of my music system, I can listen comfortably at lower volume and still hear everything in the music.
Chris Lord Alge and Bob Clearmountain still use Yamaha NS-10s. Not so sure most people would consider them to be neutral speakers. Here is some more info: http://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/assetlibrary/n/ns10m.pdf?jQWj8tYIeZeymRCNXitG9Qfwq9mLf1t0=
That I undesrtand, but I have this (albeit limited) reference point of a pair of speakers that on paper were clearly superior but only when loud. With my current system it does sound good late at night at low levels, although I know some from of variable loudness would help even further.
Distortion is perceived as volume, so a system with high distortion will be perceived as louder. That may have come into play in my listening tests back in 1990.
Distortion is perceived as volume, so a system with high distortion will be perceived as louder. That may have come into play in my listening tests back in 1990.
Hi,
It might be a bit helpful if you could be a little more definitive of what you call "genuine hi-fi" than what you've previously provided. I mean 20-20k hz. bandwith, and THD somewhat under 1% is pretty inclusive of most everything. And the listening tests and Moir papers from the 60's with recordings and equipments of those days has all been surpassed by recordings and equipments of today.
Is it possible for you to describe what you consider to be a hi-fi system without just resorting to generic terms and textbook answers?
I used to believe that, until I actually heard about six pairs of different monitors in the same room under the same conditions. These included many of the usual pro-audio and semi-pro-audio brands, from Genelec to KRK to Event, etc.
Most of them were not even close to neutral, as easily evidenced by the fact that they sounded so very different from each other.
Many appeared to attempt to imitate the strident Yamaha NS-10 sound (this was the monitor that was usually used with a sheet of toilet-tissue over the tweeter, because the sound was so harsh and ear-fatiguing without it.)
At that time, the first-generation Mackie HR-824 was new on the market. Those were, indeed, fairly close to neutral sounding. These were active monitors, and the manufacturer claimed that each speaker was manually EQ'd at the factory so that the response fitted into (I think) a +/- 1 dB window over most of the audible frequency range. Parametric EQ was built into the electronics, so the claim had some plausibility, though no information was provided on the conditions under which the EQ measurements were made (anechoic? What distance? How much smoothing? etc, etc.)
To me, the Mackie HR-824's were the class of the field, but there was a pair of inexpensive Alesis monitors that sounded very close to the HR-824 over most of the frequency range. The Mackie's did have deeper bass extension (we measured it), and better controlled bass (I could hear that without any measurements). That particular Alesis model suffered from boomy, woofy, poorly controlled bass.
These days, many companies are selling absurd little toy speakers with 2" and 3" drivers in enclosures half the size of a quart of milk, which they laughingly label "studio near-field monitors". These things are no better than the typical desktop computer speakers of a decade ago, i.e., they are pretty awful. I have no idea how this segment of the market got started. But just go over to the Guitar Center or Sweetwater websites, and you'll find examples of what I mean.
While all those near-field monitors I heard back in the late 1990s were audibly flawed, the Mackie HR-824 reset my ear as to what was acceptable. I could no longer stand to listen to the horridness of typical Polks or Infinity's or what-have-you.
From that time, I've used near-field monitors for my home TV and music listening, in conjunction with a subwoofer. Not perfect, but a lot better than a lot of the consumer-grade stuff you can find at Best Buy or Fry's Electronics or whatever.
Floyd O'Toole doesn't care much for near-field monitors, IIRC. But I don't have his speaker budget, either. 😀
-Gnobuddy
So barring professional equipment in studios, what is Hi-Fi?
Does an Onkyo TN-NR838 driving a set of Heresy speakers qualify? If not, why not?
Does an Onkyo TN-NR838 driving a set of Heresy speakers qualify? If not, why not?
it's not so much the music playback that changes at low volumes as it is the the human ear that is less sensitive to lower frequencies at lower SPL's. The difference observed is reflected in the B weighting and C weighting scales for measurement of sound pressure levels.
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The frequency response charts in the linked file show exactly why the HR824 monitors blew the ns10's away. It was always my understanding that the ns10's were used as a lo fi check that, once your mix sounds good on good monitors, you check it on the ns10's to make sure it sounds good on crappy consumer speakers
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Look at the waterfall plot for the HR824 at LF, as well as the impulse response. There are reasons not everyone uses them instead of old NS-10s. Especially, when the NS-10s are driven with a Bryston 4-B. Not such a cheap setup, exactly, but it works for its intended purpose, at least for some very successful mix engineers.
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