mick wrote:
On Sat, 11 Feb 2006 16:08:20 -0800, Andre Jute burbled:
snip
The key is the phrase which names our hobby: "high fidelity reproduction
of recorded music at home", usually just rendered as "high fidelity" or
"hi-fi". Consider the words, which are a precise description and have been
a precise description since roundabout WW2. We should ask two questions:
1. What is fidelity? This is usually taken to be a window on the concert
hall.
Oh, what a question! Fidelity: 15th century. Directly or via French
Latin fidelitas "faithfulness" fides "faith". It *could* be taken to
mean "a window on the concert hall" or it could mean "true to life". The
two arn't necessarily equal.
I do see them as equal, Mick. I can see where you're coming from.
Keith, for instance, says in a current post in this thread that horns
are an acquired taste, that you become more impressed with them as you
become more used to them. But, in general, what you hear in the concert
hall is true to life because it is life. It is the window on the
concert hall which lives in virtual reality, the CD, etc.
2. Have we achieved fidelity? The answer is generally agreed to be
negative, so that we talk about the closest approach to the concert hall,
and invariably speak only of qualified fidelity, as in "high" fidelity.
If it sounds "lifelike" to you then you have achieved "fidelity"!
Set up your best amp and speakers in your listening room and settle in
with handful of discs of Bach organ music. When you finish playing
them, come tell me how good the music, the performer, the amp, the
speakers, even your arrangement of paperback books as baffles are. That
may be lifelike to you because your mind, like everyone's mind, is an
amazingly adaptive elastic band. But unqualified fidelity it will not
be. For a start, your room, unless you live in a church, will not be
big enough accurately to reproduce the lowest bass notes.
I can say confidently, because it is a test i have conducted a few
time, that if I were to bring my horns to your listening room and
change nothing else, you would at the end of a week agree that my
Lowthers sound more lifelike than whatever you use. And another week
later, having borrowed a REM boombox from someone, you will agree that
its deep bass add something on organ music.
Together these cases demonstrate that fidelity is an aspiration, not an
achievement, certaintly not history.
The term
"high fidelity" is, of course, an invention of the marketing bods to sell
more equipment and is meaningless. ;-)
No, no, no. The men who coined the name were smart marketers, true, but
they were also honest Englishmen who didn't require a Trading Standards
Authority to tell them how to be honest and straightdealing. In
addition, you only have to read their books and articles and letters to
know that men like Gilbert Briggs had an abiding respect for the
language, so unlike the "engineers" on the audio conferences now that
the old radio hams have all retired hurt. If they though fidelity was
achieved, or was achievable in the short term, you may be certain they
would not have qualified it and thereby cut into sales. No, they added
the word "high" in front of "fidelity" a) to distinguish higher
fidelity from the lower fidelity which reigned before and b) as an
aspirational cry towards full, unqualified fidelity. Read Gilbert
Briggs on Peter Walker's prototype electrostatic loudspeaker and you
will see his remarks on its greater fidelity also include the
understanding that it in fact did not offer full fidelity, stunning as
it was when first heard; these remarks are right next to remarks on the
commercialized electrostat's likely marketing impact, so these old
guys never separated the two concepts, but nor did they tell any
weaseling lies.
Of course, modern marketing men may tell weaseling lies in order to
sell more soundalike amplifiers. I wouldn't know. I don't deal with
them. My gear is from the factory or the BBC or bought second-hand.
--
Mick
(no M$ software on here... :-) )
Web: http://www.nascom.info
Andre Jute
Do amplifiers sound different?uad
Hybrid Mode
