Audio sales have grown, but mostly in the portable audio marketplace. It's all about the music and that's why high-end audio matters most.
If you work for the audio industry?or just write about it, as I do?these are disturbing times. Here?s the good news: Sales of audio products grew by 29 percent last year, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Now here?s the bad news: Component audio sales actually fell by 16 percent. The growth in sales was driven almost entirely by portables, led by the skyrocketing iPod.
Why is that bad news for an audiophile? Because high-end audio?the good stuff?is a subset of component audio, not portable audio. As the high-end market has withered, a whole generation has grown up without knowing what the good stuff sounds like. CEA reports that 56 percent of consumers ?say they have never even heard what they’d consider a great sounding audio system.?
No matter what you listen to, you can have a closer relationship with music only if your equipment makes a closer relationship possible. And until you?ve tried high-end audio, there?s not much alphanumeric magic I can whip out to make you feel it. You just have to bring some favorite music into a well-equipped listening room and experience it for yourself.
Audiophiles and the industry that sucks up to them are infamously self-defeating. We act as if household budgets didn?t exist. We blather on about specs. We hype high-end cables, which are 25 percent helpful, 75 percent mystique, and nearly 100 percent overpriced. The latest fad is high-end power cables. I?ll have to stir up that wasp nest another time.
Great sound is not an exclusive club that you have to be a millionaire or a genius to join. An Outlaw receiver (in surround or stereo) costs way under $1000. If you want to pay five figures for a Jeff Rowland amp and preamp, that?s as legitimate as buying a Mercedes or a Saville Row suit. But you don?t have to be rich to afford a musically competent audio system. And you don?t have to be Albert Einstein to pick one you like.
I have two sets of reference loudspeakers and neither is huge or expensive. The Paradigm Studio/20 costs $400 per speaker. I use a 5.1-channel set to review surround receivers, and when I tell manufacturers of receivers what speakers I?m using, they breathe a sigh of relief. The Studio/20 is from the Reference Series. If you?re on a tight budget, step down to the Monitor Series. For the best build quality, step up to the Signature Series. The Canadian company?s institutional design goals, which cut across all product lines, are to provide relatively even frequency response and good off-axis dispersion no matter what you buy.
I?m also high on the even smaller Era Design 4, at $600/pair, in my desktop system. I reviewed them, sent back the review samples, got lonesome for them, and ended up buying another pair from the manufacturer for my desk.
Good software is as important as good hardware. There are things you can get from an LP that you can?t get from a CD, and things you can get from a CD that you can?t get from a 128kbps MP3. Likewise, a superior recording has advantages in any medium. Yes, I?m mulling over buying a monster hard drive and filling it with FLACs. But hard drives crash, and a shelf full of treasures, as my friend Mikey says, ?is like comfort food.?
What makes high-end audio better? As I said earlier, it has to do with your relationship with music. Mediocre audio has a distancing effect. It affects the quality of listening. You might not be aware of this, especially if you have no high-end experience for comparison. But music lovers with both good systems and large libraries lead different listening lives.
A critical listener has a zest for listening, an emotional range, a willingness to experiment, a compulsion to collect, and a desire to share (and I don?t just mean file sharing). A casual listener may have some of these qualities but they?re not as prominent, not as fully developed. He has fulfilled only part of his listening potential.
Portables, to a greater or lesser extent, bring the same distancing effect. Now look, I don?t want to insult your iPod. I love my little nano, and if you?re looking for something better, I recommend the JVC Alneo. But even with good headphones?which by the way needn?t be expensive either?a portable device can take you only so far. It may get you off the ground but it won?t reach the stratosphere.
One of the more pernicious effects of the iPod is that iPod-compatible docking systems may be hastening the move away from high-end systems. Sure, the iPod Hi-Fi is a great substitute for a boombox, or even for a mini-system, but I wouldn?t let it become my whole source of nourishment. That would be sort of like living on pizza. It might be really great pizza?personally I prefer to get my pie from Patsy?s in East Harlem, the last coal-fired oven in Manhattan. Sinatra used to have them sent to him in Vegas. It says so in my restaurant guide.
However, as my doctor would be the first to say, an all-pizza diet would be fatally unbalanced. He?s happier when I make room for fish and veggies. And I?m happier when I make room for crab cakes or lamb chops or some fabulous limited-edition ravioli, with a nice glass of Riesling or Frascati. That?s what birthdays and dinners with friends are for.
It was a friend, in fact, who hooked me on high-end audio. We were college students and his part-time job was at a hi-fi store. I couldn?t afford a great system in those days, but I got to know what one sounded like, and the one I did have would still sound quite good by today?s standards. Getting into sound was a logical extension of getting into music.
When you have a closer relationship with music, you listen to it differently. You?re more likely to give it your full attention so that it penetrates deep into your heart. You might even stop using it as background noise. Halfhearted listening isn?t good enough for me. Given a choice between iffy sound and silence, I?ll choose silence every time.
Sure, I use my iPod, but mainly on planes, where I can give it my undivided attention. When I?m standing in line at the supermarket, I don?t mind being alone with my thoughts. On the street, I prefer to be sensitive to what?s going on around me. Later, when I get back in front of my system, whatever time I spend with it can be relaxing or intense?but never apathetic.
One admitted contradiction in my basic message is that I?m into home theater, which is the union of video and audio. In the golden olden days it was easy to find room for two speakers, amp, and turntable. Now we have to coordinate the sweet spot with a plasma and a 5.1- (or God forbid, 7.1-) channel surround system. That takes a little more work. Which is why I relish the Era speakers in my 2.1-channel desktop system. They?re positioned to generate a good soundstage from virtually location in my living room.
Is high-end audio dying? No, I think it?ll always be around to a greater (preferably) or lesser degree. But you, pal?you?re not going to be around forever. If you?re young and healthy and have two good ears, find out what a great audio system sounds like.
Mark Fleischmann is the audio editor of Home Theater and the author of Practical Home Theater (http://www.quietriverpress.com/).
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RSSIf the bitrate reduction is too much (too much compression), the sound quality will be lousy. Some say that 128k constant is the bare minimum but I disagree; the minimum is 160k constant. Too much compression definitely manifests itself as audio that tends to have a "watery" characteristic to it, particularly in the mids and highs (percussion, vocals, piano, etc.).
Sound quality of the resulting compressed file is partially dependent on the quality of the CODEC used to encode the sound into MP3. For instance, LAME is superior to BLADE.
And, the biggest point: no matter how little compression you use and how good the CODEC is, it will never compare to the uncompressed original.
It must be known that bitrate reduction schemes, such as MP3, work by eliminating various frequencies selectively and allowing louder passages to conceal this loss through psychoacoustics. The greater the bitrate reduction, the more aggressive the CODEC will operate in this manner.
Because of this, lossy compression, such as MP3, is the antipathy of hi-fi: it's purpose deliberately distances itself from the master recording by design, unlike the LP and the Compact Disc.
More unfortunate is the push from the mainstream press for downloadable content, such was the case of a recent "50 worst things in music" article on AOL, with the CD being one of them followed by a rather foolish maxim "CD sucks! Download your music!"
If there is music that I seriously like, I'd rather buy the CD or the LP; MP3s allow me the benefit to audition a potential purchase.
I'd rather keep my Sony ES setup (it may not be considered as hi-fi to a few because it's Sony, but it's on par with Denon and the like) than go to an iPod with a speaker dock. - Reinhart
Let me say that I'm a "recovering audiophile" who at the height of his addiction owned a Koetsu Ruby phono cartridge that cost $2,500 to play his 1,200 disc collection of those now nearly defunct 12-inch licorice pizzas on his $10,000 stereo speaker system with tube electronics. Today the background music system in our living room is my wife's iPod connected to a Klipsch iFi sat/sub system that delivers a very pleasant experience. For more serious listening we retire to our media room/home theater with its rather modest ($1,2000 retail) 5.1 on-the-wall speaker system, $1,000 A/V receiver, $500 DVD player, etc., all connected with some higher-end but far from esoteric cables.
I can hardly wait until Mark delves into the moon dust world of esoteric power and signal cables, hopefully to reveal what many of us have known for decades, electrons flow "around" the wire not "through" it so a lot of the claims for truly esoteric interconnects simply don't hold water.
So, grab your favorite CD or two, head on down to your local A/V emporium and let them show you just how magnificent an experience can be had these days for considerably less cost than 3 days for a family of four at Disneyworld.
Only this weekend visited my sister who has an above average sound system with monitor audio speakers. She has only gone and replaced this and made the iPod and Boss docking speakers the music source now, there is no comparision in the sound quality, but trying telling her that.
My dilema is this, I have an excelent sound system and a big music collection on CD, I also have a portable digital music player (who doesn't). I Like the convience of selecting tunes and making up playlists from iTunes or equivalent, but need the uncompressed file quality coming through my amp. The problem is these files are too big to store in qualtity on the 'iPod'. Do you then have two copies of the song one big one small? Where to from here? Can Apple come up with a two in one solution and save high end for the good of our children's ears?
A lot of people use portable audio players while they are on the go, and because of that they have become their primary means for music. So when they come home, it's convenient to just slap your iPod into a base station and stream music from that so they can listen to their favorite play list rather than having to rip music from their collection into a better format like FLAC so they can listen to the same play list on their high-end gear.
It all comes down to time and convenience and unfortunately digital music is becoming more important than the CD in people's lives and it?s a shame. eMusic which is one of my favorite digital download sites lets you download them in 192kbps which isn?t bad, but it?s definitely better than iTunes.
I am waiting for a high-end audio MP3 player to hit the market which supports FLAC, AAC and uncompressed WMA.
For me there is nothing like locking yourself into a room with a nice pair of speakers and a nice amp, dimming the lights and bathing yourself in beautiful music?.