Musings from old school on High Fidelity


Old interview in Stereophile of JA interviewing G Holt.

Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?

Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.

Yet you achieved so much, Gordon.

I know I did, and my whole excuse for it—a love for the sound of live classical music—lost its relevance in the US within 10 years. I was done in by time, history, and the most spoiled, destructive generation of irresponsible brats the world has ever seen. (I refer, of course, to the Boomers.)

High Fidelity means REPRODUCTION with as little distorion and color as possible and a flat neutral FR within the range of human hearing that retains as much of the original source as possible. This day and age we have the ability to come close but we have chosen the path where High Fidelity means whatever subjective opinion I choose. It might be what one prefers but it isn't HiFi.
djones51

Showing 1 response by drasberry

Some thoughts from a "boomer" professional audio systems engineer and musician who has designed and built systems from high end tweak hi-fi home installations to performing arts theaters and sports arenas regarding the hobby that Syn Aud Con founder Don Davis referred to as "Hi Futility":
I love music, all kinds. I have played in everything from jazz ensembles to blues or beach music bands to symphony orchestras. Likewise I listen to a broad range of music, though I lean toward the more acoustic performance genres than electronic.

There are both empirically measurable physics and unavoidably subjective qualities involved in the design and application of audio components, especially for analog transducer elements at each end of the chain, microphones, pickups, loudspeakers, analog to digital converters at both ends.

I'll address the digital realm first since that is the easiest to deal with. Digital encoding is simply applying a scale of discrete numeric values to a varying analog voltage. Think of a simple yard stick. The physical length of the stick is represents the range of analog values. The incremental numeric marks the digital values. The smallest measurement increment is the scale resolution. For a yard stick perhaps the highest practical resolution is 1/32" and the limiting resolution beyond which it becomes useless is perhaps 1/64th inch.  Digital audio resolution has progressed from the original CD format 44.1KHz/16bit through the typical studio values of 48KHZ-96KHz 24bit to current DSP software and internal sampling values as high as 192KHz with full 32 bit float, i.e infinite fractional value encoding.
Once an audio signal is in the digital realm, the only critical thing is that those numeric values get transferred between AD and DA converters with absolute mathematical accuracy. The hardware at its best is accurate to one bit error in billions.
To quote Don Davis again, you don't empirically know something in physics until you can assign it a number. The digital audio realm today is the realm of applied mathematical physics. The only effect it can have on audio quality is that which is deliberately introduced for desired reasons depending on application. 
Two important things to understand about physics.
1. Science does not deal in absolutes. It deals in probabilities and approximations. The gold standard measurement constant in physics is the speed of light in a vacuum. After nearly 200 years physicists still quibble over the exact measurement of this value depending on which set of theoretical equations are used... at the 17th decimal place!
2. Beyond a reasonable point empirically related to the task at hand mathematical precision becomes irrelevant.
 

To be continued...