Back to Basics - An Editorial on Hi-Fi Addiction
We were digging through the archives and found this gem of an old mailer from Harry's time working at a hi-fi specialist in Johannesburg, South Africa. Over 40 years later, the messaging hits true - titled "Back to Basics - An Editorial on Hi-Fi Addiction".
We hope this helps you cut through the noise and back to the entire purpose of hi-fi - the musical enjoyment it brings.
Lets return to the basics…
This special edition was inspired by the trials and tribulations that most of us have gone through over the years during our quest for the perfect hi-fi, our hope is that, in pointing out some of the traps we fell into, we can help you avoid many of the same problems.
If we can think back far enough, we can all remember the day we bought a stereo so we could listen to our Peter, Paul, and Mary albums. Boy did we enjoy listening to that music!
Then we started to "improve" our system. A pre-amplifier and amplifier replaced our receiver... new speakers (they had to be three-way)… a bigger amplifier... a new cartridge... again a bigger amplifier... and it went on and on... We finally found ourselves buying "special" recordings (regardless of their musical content) to show off our hi-fi.
It is only now, when we look back, that we can realise the problem of the situation. We had somehow lost sight of our original goal, the enjoyment of music.
We no longer had a hi-fi to listen to our records.
We no longer bought records to listen to our hi-fi.
We no longer enjoyed listening to Peter, Paul, and Mary.
Instead we listened to what our hi-fi could do with such sonic spectaculars as a half-speed mastered recording of a freight train or a direct to disc LP that convinced your neighbours that you just took up the drums.
I know that you feel that this could never happen to you. We all felt the same way. But, hi-fi addiction can attack without warning. In the early stages you may not even know you have it. In the final phase you may be in so deep that you can't recognise the symptoms even though they are obvious to your family and friends.
If you should, God forbid, test positive for hi-fi addition, do not, I repeat, DO NOT, rush off blindly to your nearest hi-fi practitioner for the cure. All to often, the expert will prescribe an unnecessary component. We're here to offer a second opinion.
The proper course to follow is to back up a little. Get back to the basics. Ask yourself a few questions about why you have a hi-fi.
How do you evaluate a component?
How do you listen to music?
Whose advice do you take and why?
Listening to the experts…
As a hi-fi consumer, you'll find yourself in a very precarious position. You're trying to buy the best hi-fi you can afford. You cannot possibly investigate every product and combination.
Take something as simple as a speaker. There are at least 100 companies manufacturing or distributing over 1000 different models. Add to that the various turntables, arms, cartridges, and amplifiers and you have 7x10^12 different possible combinations of components.
Faced with this problem, most people give up…
They don't make a choice at all. They let someone else do it for them.
The most obvious solution is advice from the friend with the expensive hi-fi. He / she must know what know what they are doing. But does he really? What we have is a Catch 22. If he's sane, he hasn't gone through enough of the seven trillion combinations to really come up with an expert opinion. On the other hand, if he actually owned more than a few dozen different components, he is likely be in the final phase of hi-fi addition.
Turning to the next source of advice sought out, the reviewer. Given the opinion of any reviewer, you can generally find a second reviewer that disagrees. Each review published pushes them closer to the seven trillion combinations - the reviewer's focus needs to be carefully maintained to avoid treading towards hi-fi addition.
The final source of information is the pusher, I mean, the dealer. It turns out that this is either a highly reliable source or a very unreliable source. There appears to be no middle ground.
With all of these voices vying for your attention, which one do you listen to?
Again, it's time to take a step back and get back to the basics. Trust your own ears. Listen for yourself. You are buying this system so YOU can listen to music. In this case, that makes you the expert.
You are the one that has to be happy with the system, and you are the one that should make the decision.
Listening to the music…
How do you make that decision? If you think in hi-fi terms, the prospect of making that decision becomes rather intimidating.
You might remember the last time you listened to speakers in a hi-fi shop. The high-end was better on one pair, but the bass was better on the other. The front to back depth was best on one pair but the imaging might have been better on the other. And it goes on and on...
Forget about the hi-fi...
The task of picking hi-fi becomes deceptively simple if you forget about hi-fi and concentrate on the music.
Evaluate the hi-fi exactly as you would a live musical performance. You don't break a performance down into its high end and low end. You listen to it as a whole and you either enjoy it or you don't. If the performance is consistently more enjoyable through system A than through system B, you can be quite sure that A is better system.
After thinking in hi-fi terms for years, it's understandable that you may question this approach. How can you tell how good a performance really is? It is actually far easier than you might think; certainly easier than breaking the music down into a series of unrelated segments and applying a set of arbitrary standards.
For now, the important things to remember are...
You should ALWAYS be more concerned with the music than with the technology involved in reproducing the music.
You are the expert.
By using a little common sense and by applying real musical standards when you evaluate equipment you will invariably make the correct decision.