My adventures in hi-fi
A friend and colleague of mine has been very concerned about the quality of my music listening experience, ever since I expressed admiration of a pair of speakers he owns. This was recently rectified as he found a similar pair for sale. After doing my due diligence – i.e., borrowing them and comparing them against the ones I already owned, using about 20 kg of hi-fi gear borrowed from him – my wife decided to give them to me as my birthday present. So now I am the proud owner of a pair of Duntech PCL-10's in like-new condition, which, I am assured, were the bee's knees for small listening rooms in about 1995.
It's been interesting. I've been hearing things in music I know quite well that I didn't realize were there. For example, Leonard Cohen plays with the recording studio as an instrument. In "Morning Glory" from Dear Heather, he's conducting a dialog with himself. I hadn't realized that there's a spatial relationship between the two Leonards, one at center stage, the other towards the back at stage right. In another, "The Faith," he's conducting a similar dialog with his chorus, but this time the chorus and all of the instruments are clearly localized in space, while his voice floats unlocalized, overlaying the entire auditory space. This adds a whole new dimension – quite literally – to the music.
So yeah, there is a point to this hi-fi thing, besides just new toys to play with: the experience is different and richer.
I got curious about this stuff and am reading a book called This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. There's some fascinating stuff there about how the brain constructs music from vibrations in the air, and then reacts to it. It's simultaneously simpler and more complex than I expected. He's exploring the interface between the mind and the world from a very interesting angle.
I also did some reading up on hi-fi. That was fascinating too, but for a different reason. I was struck by the sheer amount of woo and magical thinking around it. There's a certain amount of it among cameras and watches too – two other gadget-related things I'm interested in – but nowhere near as much. Nobody I know is claming that a Rolex is better at telling the time than a Casio, for example, and most camera-related brand wars are about the meaning of unambiguous, observable differences, Sigma Foveon fanatics notwithstanding. The only thing I've come across that comes close is the cosmetics industry.
We have magic digital interconnects that "increase clarity" or "broaden the sound stage." There are magic rocks you can put on your CD player that are supposed to make it sound better. There are racks with crystals embedded in the shelves that, they claim, will make your music sound clearer. Not among the occasional crank, mind – this is the stuff that goes on in completely mainstream publications. Steve Guttenberg, formerly of Stereophile magazine, currently at CNet, for example, who is really good at pointing out things to listen for, is completely full of it.
Thing is, hi-fi – high fidelity – is not a complicated concept. It just means reproduction of sound as closely as possible to the way it was originally generated. This process has two hard parts and one easy part. The hard parts are the end points: recording at one end, and conversion of an electrical signal to sound at the other. Recording is clearly both an art and a craft, and physics dictate that speaker construction is also a fine act of balancing constraints against each other, with "acoustically transparent" speakers remaining elusive – at least at prices and sizes ordinary humans can afford, or want in their homes. What's more, the room you put them in, and how you position them, will make a major difference on how they sound.
The electrical part, on the other hand, is easy. Electronics is a mature science and engineering discipline that's been around since the late 19th century. We're now so good at signal processing that we can talk to a space probe launced in 1977, and now on the very edge of the solar system.
Ever since digital recording and playback, everything from the microphone to the part where the speaker wire connects to the speaker has been "acoustically transparent" – i.e., so close to perfect human hearing won't be able to pick up on the distortions introduced – unless something is defective or pushed outside its operational parameters (e.g. by cranking up the volume on the amp so much it starts to clip the peaks). Put bluntly, all competently made cables, amplifiers, CD players, and digital music recorders sound the same. Yet this is exactly the part where the woo is thickest.
Any practical advice? I can only relay what I've learned so far.
The amplifier doesn't matter, as long as it's not defective and is powerful enough to drive your speakers. The best value for money is in home theater A/V receivers from mainstream brands. There are some inexpensive stereo amplifiers around too, which don't sound any better but have fewer features – and by extension fewer complications – to deal with. The used market has scads of amps available as well; the only potential problem with that is that they might be defective, and some of the problems might not be obvious without a known quantity to compare against. If some capacitors have lost their capacitance, for example, the amp might appear to work fine, but is distorting the signal enough to make an audible difference. This isn't difficult or expensive to fix, but you do have to be an electronics geek to be able to diagnose the problem correctly first!
The CD player doesn't matter, as long as it's not broken. You can pick up a perfectly good used one for 10 euros or even for free. I grabbed one – a Sony from the late 1990's or early noughties – from the office, where this same colleague had squirreled several away a while back, after a neighbor moved out and was about to cart them to a landfill.
The speakers matter. Unfortunately I'm completely out of my depth giving buying advice on them. All I can say about that is that I've found it useful to listen to the Chesky Records Ultimate Demonstration Disc, which points out things to listen for. There is a loose correlation between price and quality in speakers, but I'm not convinced that simply throwing money at this problem is the right way to go. Most of the speakers I've liked have fallen under the "studio monitor" category, but that's really just me. Speakers are much less risky to buy used, since, having no moving parts and being electronically simpler, they're less likely to be broken.
The room and speaker placement matters. I've experimented placing them at various positions, and in some places they "snap into focus" – my perception shifts from "music playing from two speakers" to "music coming from an imaginary soundstage in the general direction of the speakers." It's like a phase shift, where my brain suddenly gets the right cues to interpret the sound in a different way. It's similar to the feeling you get when one of those Magic Eye illusions snap into focus and suddenly you see a three-dimensional object emerging from the chaotic mess of points you were just looking at.
Real hi-fi is no longer prohibitively expensive, nor difficult. What bothers me is that it's unnecessarily daunting. For example, speaker manufacturers are extremely coy about the measured performance about their speakers, which makes it very difficult to compare them. This even though you could represent pretty much everything you need to know about them in two or three curves – frequency response, total harmonic distortion, and phase. I'm pretty sure any competent manufacturer measures these. They just don't want to share them. I think it's because too much information would ruin the woo: people arguing ferociously about the merits of various products is golden for the industry. That's too bad in my opinion. Music is rather wonderful, and more people could be able to listen to it better without it.