The difference between mainstream HIFI, budget seperates, midrange and high end?

No, for the vast majority!

Only s fool would pay a premium for something that effectively costs nothing.

Of course you could be talking about people with vastly more money than sense, in which case I would agree with you - they perhaps don't care. They are also an insignificant speck within the audio industry.

If I placed two televisions in front of you but had opened the back of one and tweaked the picture settings to give a more punchy, vibrant image, and you preferred it, you wouldn't expect to pay two or three times the price of the normal set.
Well, actually you might - until it was explained exactly how both sets were in fact almost the same but that one had been slightly tweaked.
Knowledge is the key. Without it you just expose yourself to every crook going.

 

The only problem with this scenario is Joe Six Pack can easily learn how to twist a few knobs armed with a video test disk and flatten the response of the TV. Achieving the same with audio equipment (or recognizing it needs to be done) damn near requires a degree in electronics and/or psychoacoustics, enough knowledge to redesign or modify circuits, or at least years dedicated to the hobby hearing a wide range of gear and attending live events to learn the absolute sound. Joe is not interested in acquiring this level of knowledge. He simply wants to enjoy his music at a price he can afford. Can't say I blame him.

 

There are people who don't want to spend their time in getting knowledge in a specific field. They prefer to invest their time in other things (maybe knowledge in other fields) and therefore are pleased to give a premium for not waisting their time in getting knowledge in a field they are absolutely not interested in.

Hifi is not only technical knowledge (physics) but also music knowledge, knowledge in psychoacoustic and some other fields. I wish that technical specialists also would get knowledge in for example how instruments sound in orchestras and in different halls, not only rely on their measurements and beliefs. That is not done by going to a concert every month.

 

Whilst I understand your point, I don't agree.

At the end of the day, if your interest in Hi-Fi is purely because of a love of music then any kit that improves that enjoyment is worth paying a premium for. If that is, the individual is prepared to pay that premium, some people aren't. Classic example is Vinyl. Clearly technically inferior to CD in some ways yet many people are prepared to pay significanly more on a TT than a CD player in order to gain what they consider to be a superior musical performance. Who is to tell them they are wrong?

If, how ever your interest in Hi-Fi is in the misguided belief that you will in some way achieve technical accuracy to the original performance then obviously the, (measured), technical performance of a peice of kit will be a strong influence over your perception of its value.

Before anyone takes umbridge with my use of the term misguided, I'll clarify my statement thus:

No recording process will accurately portray the actual sound created by the intstruments being played at the time of the recording. Far too much manipulation of the signal takes place for various reasons, commercial and technical, that deviates it from it's true "live" sound. Given that your listening room is also going to add it's own "character" to the sound eminating from your (highly inaccurate) speakers, trying to achieve complete technical accuracy with respect to the sound of the original instruments is effectively pointless.

 

Please give examples of signal manipulation in recordings of classical music that change the sound of the instruments.
How much are the deviations?
So what you're saying is that a trumpet will sound like a guitar and the violins like cellos and the recording engineer and conductor will find that perfect.

Certainly, for those who still haven't done anything serious to their rooms.
The point is also how much you really want to have as reproduction goal the "live" sound of the recording place from the position of the microphones. In a concert hall the character of the soundstage changes according to the listening position and we still declare all these different sounds as "live". Therefore there can be some deviations (to a certain level) in some sound characteristics and nevertheless we consider it as "Live".

 

Well we differ on that.
Hi-fi is mix of electronics and mechanics and doesn't follow special rules.

Manufacturers should be honest.
I've they've made a subtle change to the design to alter performance they should be realistic about the pricing.
That is just basic honesty in my book, though it comes as no surprise that a lot of manufacturers aren't.

Just because it is understandable doesn't make it defensible.

 

Well we differ on that.
Hi-fi is a mix of electronics and mechanics and doesn't follow special rules.

Manufacturers should be honest.
If they've made a subtle change to the design to alter performance they should be realistic about the pricing.
That is just basic honesty in my book, though it comes as no surprise that a lot of manufacturers aren't.

Just because it is understandable doesn't make it defensible.

 

Depends on your starting point for the discussion.

If, like me, you believe that enhanced musical enjoyment comes with better technical performance then I would naturally have to disagree with the rest of your statement.

IMO vinyl is both technically and musically inferior to CD, though of course if the mastering differs markedly between the two versions the preference may switch.

 

first impressions can be misleading. Being presented with an upfront punchy picture/sound may impress but it later comes to fatigue.

increased enjoyment can come with learning. not only learning how to listen but also learning what equipment to invest in, so that the enjoyment lasts.

just an opinion of course

 

all my kit is second-hand, delivering what is, imho, a hi-end set-up for mid-level pricing. And that was only possible through some learning on my part, and some folk on forums like this to learn from.

I would recommend that route to anyone who wants to re-discover delight in music of almost all types

 

This makes interesting reading and sits well with the subject under discussion.

$3000 extra gets you a different case and badge. Hey-ho!

http://audioholics.com/reviews/tran...-ray-oppo-clone/oppo-inside-lexicon-outside-1

Interesting to see that other magazines, unaware that they were in fact listening to the same machine in a different coat have reported, naturally, that the machine carrying the $3000 premium sounds much better.

Yet still some won't accept the importance of blind testing!

 

Easy, equalisation, limiting, compression. They are all routinely used in all recording processes even in so called "audiophile" classical recordings.

My point is purely that there is no way to know with certainty what the actual timbre and tonality of the actual live instruments used in a specific recording were as they are routinely altered in the recording processes for the purposes of "clarity", radio play, etc etc

Of course the manipulation won't cause a trumpet to sound like a guitar but if you have any first hand experience with live intsruments you will know very well that each individual instrument of the same type, (eg trumpet, violin, cello etc) will have a subtlely different tonality to the one being played by the person next to them.

There are fundamental audio aspects of rooms, (defined by the laws of physics), that can never be completely removed by any method of room treatment, end of story.

 

My point, (see above), is how do you know any given piece of kit has "better technical perormance"? Sure it's easy to measure whether it is accurate to its input, but is that neccisarily going to give a more accurate final reproduction? Answer of course is dependant on what you are trying to reproduce, the original recording or the original sound of the instruments in that recording?

As I stated above, the second is impossible to know so how can we as individuals with no knowlege of the original instruments make any valid judgment as to the "accuracy" of the kit we're trying to evaluate? Simple, we can't so any such evaluations are by definition always going to be subjective. The first is also impossible to actually know with any certainty, as we don't know what the original master sounds like, so the best we can do is assume that if every peice of kit in the replay chain is measureably accurate to it's input the resulting sound must therefore be accurate to the original master. However, don't ever be fooled in to believing this is anything more than an assumption as it can never be verified without a techical analysis of the original master itself.

Technically certainly, musically as you say that's your opinion, others would disagree. When it comes to such subjective opinions there is of course no wrong or right.

For the record, I am half way between the two camps. My head tells me to choose technically accurate equipment, but at the end of the day I ultimately judge subjectively with my ears. If what I hear doesn't correspond to my own subjective memory of what live instruments sound like I will reject it. I tend to evaluate equipment by listening to as varied genres of music (from sources that I am familiar with) as I can, generally aiming for reproduction that has the fundamental values of what the relevant individual instruments should (in my mind) sound like, allowing for the fact that I have no actual accurate frame of reference. I tend to hold to the tenet that an "accurate" system will make different recordings sound different from each other. If every recording has a homogeneous sound then I conclude it must be the system that is imposing it's own sound on the replay.

 

Interestingly however, they do actually measure slightly differently in a couple of places. I'm not for one second saying that the differences are audiable in anyway. But something must be different if CH 6 on the THD plots is so significantly different as that is not the kind of difference in plot you would ever see from component batch variation, (barring the posibility of a faulty component that is).

However as you say, there is no doubting the effect of a heavier chasis etc on percieved quality.

It should be noted however that such failings are not exclusive to audiophiles. I've known people to report that their car drives better after they've cleaned and polished it !!

 

That is not the end of story but just the beginning. Only because the acoustical character in another place is different, it doesn't mean that we cannot percept the sound very similarly. Our ears are not microphones.
Second I wonder why people always talk about "exactly the same", "remove completely" and other absolute adjectives. Not even in the same concert hall at the same position when the orchestra plays one after the other a same passage ten times you'll have twice the same physically identical situation.
And when you sit 4 rows behind and 5 seats to the left (or right) the fundamental audio aspects of that position is also not completely the same and nevertheless the orchestra sounds the same and live too.

More you sit futher away from the instruments, less you'll notice the difference between two of the same type. The subtle different tonality to the one being played by the person next is very relative when listening to orchestral music and sitting in the 13th-17th row. It becomes even less important when sitting more behind.
If someone has the necessity to listen to classical music at home as if he would sit in the first row of a concert hall I would completely agree with you.

Equalizing has become lately less in vogue or at least not so intensive as it was done before.
Compression doesn't have a big impact on the timbre except for when the music gets very loud. It does have an impact for the "live" feeling. Though I must say that the range 35 db - 92 db(A) at my listening place for a Shostakovich symphony is enough for my ears. I don't really need those extra 3-4 dbs more.

 

Obviously the timbre of individual instruments is rather moot in orchestral music, when the whole point is the "mass" sound, (of certain instruments at least). Also your point about the variation of live sound depending on where you sit in the acoustic of the auditorium, (or where the mics may have been placed), is another reason why it's not possible to know how the orignal instruments sounded at the recording session.

However generally speaking orchestral music isn't recorded by microphones placed somewhere in the audience. The individual instruments or groups of instruments are generally individually mic'ed and then mics are placed in the auditorium to capture its acoustics which is then added to the overall mix.

My point here is only that the original sound is always going to be an unknown and so therefore the best we can ever do to evaluate equipment is use our individual subjective frame of reference about what we expect the music and individual instruments to sound like. Using equipment that is known to be "accurate" is just one, (totally valid), way to approach musical enjoyment. But at the end of the day we still use our ears to make the final evaluation. I doubt very much that anyone, except the most masochistic among us maybe, would use a system that they thought sounded terrible purely because they know it to be technically accurate.

 

I think I am guilty spending more than I needed to on equipment. It's very easy to become embedded in the whole hifi thing.

MF KW 55O amp
Chord Coral Preamp
B&W MPA1 Mono Blocks
Teac Esoteric X-03SE
Proac D15 Speakers
Thorens 321 TT

 

sometimes it might be cheaper to invite the band around for a few drinks

 

Just had my eyes (ears) opened, I bought a Squeezebox Duet (after over a year of humming and Harring) and was slightly surprised to find it sounds as good (using Wav files) as my £1200.00 CD player.

I simply can't tell them apart with any accuracy.

 

Well, in my 42 years I've never seen 'humming and harring' written down. Funny innit?