Critic's Corner

RE: 1.Listening to music 2. On the hi-fi

65.100.170.3

In Reply to: RE: 1.Listening to music 2. On the hi-fi posted by TT on July 13, 2007 at 20:26:16

Dear T&T,

Very interesting post, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Thanks!

I agree that good systems expose the differences between well-engineered recordings and those that suffer from a lack of professionalism. This may somewhat irritate the listener and prevent them from enjoying bad recordings, even if the musical quality is high.

On the other hand, just as you have stated, a good system allows one to enjoy competently-produced music more than a lo-fi one would.

What I would like to add to the mix is what I see with my customers - every year I make it a point to visit at least a dozen customers' homes, in order to better-understand how the speakers that my company (YG Acoustics www.yg-acoustics.com) creates end up being installed/fed/used. Customers can range anywhere from "battle-seasoned" audiophiles to other well-off music-lovers who first heard of high-end by listening to our speakers at a friend's house. Regardless of the background and technical expertise of the customer, I usually find people who thoroughly enjoy listening to a wide variety of music, both from audiophile- as well as run-of-the-mill major-labels. Most listen to music for 3~4 hours a day, and their CD collection typically consists of several shelf-racks/drawers. I would estimate the average collection size at a few thousands of CDs, with some customers going way above this. As one would imagine, even with a collection of only 1000 CDs most are not "audiophile".
I once asked a customer in Germany how come he listens to so much techno music, and whether it bothers him that it is decidedly not an audiophile recording (at least the piece that I had listened to on his system), and his answer was that while he prefers some labels to others when it comes to sound quality, the high-end system allows him to fully appreciate the complexities that musicians embed inside their creations, which are simply inaudible on lesser setups - subtle rhythm elements, a lead role repeating the background tune from a different piece by the same musician etc.
I think that his response summarizes high-end in an interesting way (I have paraphrased to match the initial format from Stereophile) - 1. to appreciate good music and enjoy its subtleties to the fullest 2. thanks to the use of equipment that allows those subtleties to reach our ears unharmed.
Just my two cents.

Best,
Yoav Geva (Gonczarowski)
YG Acoustics

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