jh901 wrote: > > The conclusion you guys are making seems to be that all gear sounds the > same. You really believe that? > I don't think anybody is suggesting that. The main point is that hi-fi does not always sound "good" or "nice", and that good/nice audio is not always hi-fi. The price of the gear has little to do with how enjoyable or exciting it is to listen to, but it has a lot to do with how "high fidelity" it is.
My take on this is: 1. Hi-fi from different brands usually sounds different in all sorts of ways from other brands - but as the gear gets more expensive / more accurate the differences become smaller. 2. True "high fidelity", as the name suggests, reproduces music warts and all and should sound fantastic with a great recording and appalling with a bad one. Good hi-fi can only be tested for its fidelity if it is played at realistic levels (i.e. loud), in a reasonably large room that is acoustically well damped. It should be full spectrum - reproducing both the highest and lowest notes we can perceive without undue emphasis in one area of the frequency spectrum. 3. Hi-fi can only really be tested objectively when reproducing acoustic music and compared with *real instruments*. An acoustic folk band or string quartet is bloody loud if you are standing within 10 feet of it - which is where the microphones used for the recording will have been placed. If the hi-fi passes that test with a high score then it will also reproduce electric / synthetic music in the way that the composer intended too. You cannot tell what the composer intended with "synthetic" music knocked up on an Apple Mac, so it is impossible to objectively test using it. So in order to get objectively "high fidelity" reproduction you will need a very good source, very powerful and accurate amplification and large (for the bass) and un-coloured loudspeakers. Get those factors right and you are halfway there, but to get even that far you will need a LOT of money. Oh, and you will also need a house with a listening room large enough! The room is usually the most expensive part of any hi-fi. Now, can you get an acceptably pleasant and enjoyable sound from a cheaper / smaller system? Of course! And it may also make a reasonable stab at tonal, timbral and rhythmic accuracy. But it is unlikely to reproduce music with enough "scale" to be truly high fidelity. I suspect that there is now a lot less difference between expensive and cheaper musical sources than when LP was the main medium. A recent blind test of several DACs in a UK magazine (Hi-fi Choice) highlighted how the sound of each DAC was not well correlated to its price, and how one stood out head and shoulders above the others, despite being inexpensive (it was the Rega DAC if you must know). The same magazine also blind tested the Touch against a number of expensive streamers costing around £1,000 and (even with its internal DAC) the Touch easily matched them sonically - so it came out on top in value for money terms by a mile. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TheLastMan's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=16021 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=95757
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