What is the difference between HiFi and High-End?
According to Wiki, The definition of High-End is :
"gear below which’s price and performance one could not go without compromising the music and the sound"
And the HiFi is :
"high-quality reproduction of sound to distinguish it from the lower quality sound produced by inexpensive audio equipment"
It looks like High-End is the ultimate form of HiFi, in other words, HiFi can be a compromised version of High End. 😀
According to Wiki, The definition of High-End is :
"gear below which’s price and performance one could not go without compromising the music and the sound"
And the HiFi is :
"high-quality reproduction of sound to distinguish it from the lower quality sound produced by inexpensive audio equipment"
It looks like High-End is the ultimate form of HiFi, in other words, HiFi can be a compromised version of High End. 😀
Well put!
Add to that, someone will say, "If there is no universally agreed definition of color "green" (and there isn't!), we will just go round and round." 🙄
But the wavelengths of green can be measured, although where it merges with yellow or blue will always be debatable. Comparing that with the term "high fidelity", is somewhat disingenuous.
Not at all and I have absolutely no idea why you would think that.
All I'm saying that HiFi must be referenced to the waveform we have purchased or streamed rather than the sound originally made by the instrument.
No argument there (other that it happened well before those two albums) just that as has been said before, there is no reference 'original event'. Now this doesn't matter per se, as a good system should work with whatever you throw at it and if you can afford £50k of PMC, JBL, ATC etc and a properly treated room you can just kick back and wallow in sound. For the rest of us who are more constrained in budget, space and SWMBO there are compromises and trade offs so you have to pick what your system excels at. Of course the rest of the world thinks we brits have our QUAD ESLs and pipes and slippers and listen to marching bands whilst reading the times but actually I have never heard a pair of ESL 57 or 63 🙂. But I do put particular focus on getting the best stereo illusion I can get and my speakers were chosen as the best at that from those I could afford at the time. One day I might once again get a big enough room to enjoy them in their full glory. Motorhead is suboptimal through them, but its a trade off I am personally happy with. Others may not care a jot about stage depth but want the slam of rock and roll. They would not be served well by my current system.
The other issue is setup. For those of us in compromise land the speakers need to be set up and their position, toe in, height etc adjusted with the rest of the room until optimised for the particular use case. Now for me, when going through this angsty OCD process its helpful to have naturally recorded music in an acoustic space to help judge if its right yet. You of course also need some mono tracks (or a mono button) the LEDR test and preferably measurement mic to see how lumpy your room is, but the final arbiter should be how 'real' music sounds (for a given value of real).
I am of course aware that a chunk of the above it pure ritual required to make me beleive it will sound good.
That "why" has been explained on the same post. 🙄
For DACs, preamps, amps and cables, yes. For speakers and room acoustics, not entirely because they will ultimately need listening evaluation.
50k of new speaker quickly becomes 20k on the secondhand market.. And over a couple of decades will be a few grand or less. Get some Meridian M10s and upgrade some bits with a total outlay of 1k max and you're not far off on the same active theme. Have seen un practical softet mounted Questeds with AtC units and amps been on eBay unsold for 2.5k a good while ago..
Choose carefully a or go DIY and similar setups are not out of reach if you want it. Whether one really wants it though...
Choose carefully a or go DIY and similar setups are not out of reach if you want it. Whether one really wants it though...
Wavelengths can be measured yes but whether it is called green is subjective. Unless of course you redefine green to be something between certain wavelengths - that's not how people use the term green though and green can be a few things to different people and even the brain can see completely different things depending on it's normal frame of reference e.g. that Blue / brown or cream /black dress photo that caused a sensation on the Internet a while ago..
So even if high fidelity was clearly defined, still subjective experience and context would make it different things to people.
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I used to know many recording engineers and was told that cheap near field monitors were never meant for critical monitoring work...they were simply to hear what the recording sounds like on a kitchen radio/cheap domestic system....and they are a LOT better to listen to than those 'Horritones' which preceded them!
You find me a pair of ATC SCM100As for 2K and I will be very happy. They are 20 years old now (the non-SL ones). There is a single 100A for 3k at the moment and most pairs are 10k mark. If I were to dump the apogees I think I would go ATC, or at least ATC drivers. Irrational but there you go. But right now space is at a premium.
Near fields used to check the mix is fine (Phil collins I know used to record a cassette of the rough mix and play it on a boom box to check) but it seems increasingly some are doing the whole mix on them. Which seems wrong. Almost as wrong as spending 4x the cost of the speakers on a super amp for them.
How old are these definitions? I would say price has very little to do with performance (once you get past a certain point) except for speakers.
Seems to me that much of the back and forth discussion going on recently can be viewed from the perspective we are trying to solve a problem or make a decision with regard to how to define Hi-Fi.
In that process, there seems to be a lot more lawyer-like arguments made than some kind of cooperative working group discussion to find a practical scientific, or useful engineering, definition of Hi-Fi.
That is, there appears to be a dearth of exploratory thought, and a bountiful supply of confirmatory thought.
That type of pattern is commonly associated with long discussions and ongoing disagreements that end up going nowhere.
So, my thought would be, if we can gain some insight into what we have gotten ourselves into, there may be some slight chance we can rein in some of that default behavior, and try to see if we can proceed in a more exploratory and cooperative way.
That being said, the way Haidt describes the deeply seated human nature involved, my hope may amount to wishful thinking. Maybe worth a try to get people thinking about it though.
One thing for sure, once the effects Haidt describes are understood and looked out for, its fairly easy to see the behavior in other people.
But, much, much more difficult to see it in one's self. Often impossible, unfortunately.
Still, if one knows other people know about the effects and one is being watched for signs of them, and that one may then being judged accordingly, it just might have some influence on one's conduct.
Consider the proposition that most of people would prefer not to have others think of one's self as foolish or self-righteously impulsive, especially if there may be an associated risk of being held publicly accountable by the group for one's lapses and perceived faults. That can be a strong incentive to pay more careful attention to how one conducts one's self.
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Firstly I never did believe that Phil Collins was a serious musician...so his opinions are not really creditworthy in the overall scheme of things.🙂
As for those who are using these speakers as main monitors - I assume for here today, gone tomorrow music - nothing would surprise me less. I know that similar speakers are often used for location work when a proper facility is impossible, but that will be just to get it down and will be rerun and balanced in a proper room with proper monitors. Properly trained pros know how to do this sort of work...even on very few tracks.
recently? Have you not checked the archives here, its being going on for 10 years or more. Pretty much the same argument in one of the lounge topics.
Haidt was not talking about an internet forum when he wrote that, so was not taking into account all of the strange behavioural traits that appear when people are protected by the anonymity of a remote connection so behave often in completely different ways to how they would face to face.
Add in the mix of people here, from industry professionals, EEs, physicists, legendary designers, care in the community cases and deluded audiophiles escaping from head-fi and I think its slightly stretching the point.
To make it worse there is tribalism to a degree. Some on here have been friends for decades. Then roll in the weariness of trying to explain the same basic points of acoustics to the confused for 10 years or more and watch answers get shorter and less tolerant.
This is a free an unmoderated forum for the most part. It contains people from all corners of the world. Some actually want to talk DIY, which is amazing 🙂. And there is some great work being done hidden in the low S/N of general ignorance here.
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Maybe not, but I like Prog. The reason I used that example is that there is actual verifiable proof of it to balance a lot of the conjecture. Do you want me to check how Karajan monitored recordings? Or is he also not serious enough for you 😛
I'm sure you did in your head but the post makes very little sense as it stands especially since I don't really care about the original event or live concerts with reference to HiFi so why you are bringing up that 'perfect fidelity' canard and finish with 'go to live concerts if you don't like it' is beyond me and appears nonsensical.
DGG recordings were at their worst whilst vK ran the BP !😉 I had enough of them and they never seemed better than lower average on decent replay equipment.
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