"borosteve" wrote in message
...
On 21 Jun, 23:34, "Arny Krueger" wrote:
"Doki" wrote in message



I noticed today in John Lewis that they had no hifi or
hifialike gear for sale at all.

How do you define "hifi"?

The word hifi is a shortening of "high fidelity" and high fidelity
refers to
reproducing sound with accuracy.

Loads of digital radios,

Surely some of them are at least somewhat accurate in their
reproduction.

mp3 players

Which can be used with highly accurate earphones and headphones to
obtain
good, accurate sound.

and sets of little speakers that ipods fit onto,

Some of which are actually fairly accurate, or at least no less
accurate
than some middle- or low-priced traditional home stereo sets.

but no mini systems

Some of those really sucked.

or seperates at all.

Arguably separates have been in their decline ever since integrated
amplifiers and then receivers became more popular.

Has the mass market for hifi stuff completely died?

The market for high fidelity audio has changed. It is now dominated by
portable and personal use equipment.

The
emphasis seems to have turned entirely to subwoofers that
produce midbass at a very small range of frequencies
(bandpass box perhaps?) along with a load of little
speakers that sound absolutely horrible.

There are many examples of that technology that sound great. You have
to
spend a little money for them and be careful what you buy. IOW,
nothing has
really changed except the format.

Some kit has
only tweeters for stereo seperation with a "sub"
producing the mid range.

Well, the speakers may be the size of tweeters, but it is possible
that some
of them cover a lot more than just the treble.

Even the B&W zeppelin thing
sounded *very* poor to me.

I haven't had the opportunity to hear it.

It seems very strange to me given that development has
been driven by better quality in the past - ie moving
from LPs to CDs.

Many portable music players provide something that is effectively CD
quality, when they are playing files that are not lossy-compressed.

I suspect if you did a side by side
comparison with £500s worth of relatively mass market
gear from 15 years ago (probably an amp, CD player and a
pair of bookshelf speakers, or a mini system) compared to
current gear (ie, ipod dock and ipod), the old stuff
would sound better.

15 years ago we knew that really good headphones at a given price
point
would vastly outperform speakers at the same price. The only thing
that has
changed is that we have more options for really good headphones and
earphones.

How do you define "accurate"? Accurate to what? Unless you were there
when the recording was made and have an incredible memory of audio,
then the judgement of what is accurate or not is ********.Yes you may
have an idea of how it should sound..For example.A piano played in one
venue will have a different sound when played in another.An
individuals judgement of what might be accurate is purely a subjective
one.However,what sound better is another matter.There is no doubt that
MP3 has driven peoples expectations of hifi downward.There's little
point in buying superb replay equipment if you supply it low quality
source material.



The sad bit is that with the right sample rate mp3 can sound quite
acceptable. From something I say earlier this week - may even have been
in this thread - the crossover point is a sample rate somewhere between
192 and 224Kb/s. Browse many of the download sites that do give sample
rates and you will find that some (notably classical) do 192 most of the
time, some at 224 or 256 and the odd one as high as 320, but go looking
at pop/rock and you will find some at 160 but most at 128 and that is
where the real quality dumbing-down has occurred.


--
Woody

harrogate three at ntlworld dot com