FUTURE OF HI-FI

[CnoEvil]

Of course, vinyl is riddled with issues - wow/flutter, distortion and so on, while the "ambient" reference that's thrown around with abandon by the likes of Audio Note's guy is the kind of thing that gets lost when blind testing comes into it. What people hear against what they claim to hear are two vastly different things in my experience. Plus, of course, Audio Note, like many high end hifi companies, have a product to sell and they'll tie in the features to their marketing.

Again, CD (or digital more accurately) is not less good than vinyl - it might spec out as the "lesser" of the two if you chart the numbers, but in practice, doesn't pan out. In any case, I'm not out to invalidate your argument. I just think it's wrong - no offence again - but the usual "...some people can't hear the difference, doesn't mean it's not there..." is a high end hifi staple and one I've always thought weak.

Don't get me wrong, I like my vinyl, still got all my records and love the experience, but I know what I can hear alright and I'm pretty comfortable with that, plus of course, I've compared a £500 turntable setup with a £600 CDP with very well-known recordings at home so any differences between those two are shown up, which to my understanding puts the "you can't hear what I can" theory to bed.

This arguement can go round and round till the cows come home, and we won't agree......we are both too long in the tooth and opinionated to change each others' mind.

There's measurable specs and there's subjective assessment......so differences of opinion will always surround the latter, which is great and what makes the world go round.

I'm very happy to agree.... to disagree, and enjoy the debate

Cno

 

[chebby]

With electricity going up massively in price every year (or twice a year) at what seems an exponential rate, the future of hifi will be with far more energy efficient designs than 'traditional' hifi.

 

[busb]

Two things in particular catch my eye in this thread. Firstly, that music is somehow dying, being diluted, not being recorded well or not being what is used to be etc. I find music just as fascinating now as it was in my youth but generally better recorded. As I get older, I'm more open to different genres & more tolerant of other people's tastes. Secondly, that convenience is inversely proportional to sound quality. If someone listens exclusively to vinyl then a degree of inconvenience compared to other formats is a fact - I call that choice. Whether or not some people regard digital as being inferior or not is their right. Other people may also regard digital as being inferior but by an insufficient margin to not enjoy the convenience of using it. My opinion is that we live in a Golden Age of music where a huge amount of back-catalogue is permanently available albeit in digital formats. To me, HiFi is merely a means to listening, hopefully with the highest degree of quality, convenience, cost & portability when required. I can remember demonstrating a Sony Ericsson phone's ability to sample a piece of music then identify with a high degree of accuracy - it was very impressive. My iPhone allows me to buy the indentified music within seconds!

One consideration in the future is whether or not people will insist on having a physical copy of music (or video) as opposed to virtual access. If people are happy to buy books on a kindle to read, I submit that most people will be happy to have access to music in the same fashion - as long as they are convinced that they won't lose the ability to listen, watch or need to repurchase if lost.

My view is that more & more music will be available in HD formats if at a premium cost. What interests me is that there seems to be far more folk wanting HD video than sound. A lot of people will spend a fortune on a sound system in their car but have a music centre at home! I don't know if young people are more or less interested in SQ than say 30 years ago or not or whether or not the HiFi industry needs to appeal to today's generation somewhat differently. The industry did seem a bit behind the times in using images of women as eye candy in advertising so should perhaps acknowledge that women also listen to music. How many women work in HiFi shops (I’ve met a couple)? I do not notice that there are more men or boys listening to personal stereos than women & girls so I contend that the industry needs to appeal differently than it does now!

I don't distinguish between listening to music or watching TV or a movie. I do note that many users of modern HD TVs complain how poor the sound quality is. These people are willing to spend serious money on the picture but still want to listen to the internal speakers!! Many of these people own HiFi systems but just don't integrate video with their stereo systems when they could. I have several friends who have a TV & DVD player more or less sited between their speakers but don't connect them up together!

I want to listen to music at home from my iPhone, CD/BR player, TV/radio or server. Starting a song could optionally bring my TV out of standby & list the songs or access an online database if necessary. If my system hasn’t played the track or collection before, it could be set to ask if I want to purchase it immediately or add to a list. Such a system could list other stuff from the same artist or search out information on YouTube. If I’m watching TV, a film or listening to a radio channel & music plays that interests me – a press of a button or a tap on my wireless keyboard samples the song then looks it up. The same could apply to a movie clip. The TV manufacturers will eventually wise-up to the fact that people don’t just want to access a very truncated list of websites but the whole lot – navigation by wireless keyboard & mouse. The distinction between PC/Mac/TV/video/radio/phone/HiFi/home automation/messaging will blur as much as you want it to.

It would be ironic if vinyl ended up being the saviour of much of the record industry. YouTube & social networking could otherwise render much of that industry obsolete. Musicians could either create music at home or hire studio time without the middlemen. Classical music requires more organisational infrastructure that’s currently offered by record labels. The existing music industry may shrink to administer copyright issues or press vinyl. IMO, a shrinking music industry or more accurately, far fewer record labels does not mean less music or poorer recordings!

I’m not convinced as some that CDs will outlast vinyl maybe they will – the future is notoriously difficult to predict. Digital will remain but vinyl is back with a vengeance & much of it being bought by the young. As for radio, I’m not sure how long FM radio will be broadcast (ask the car manufacturers for an answer). DAB was launched prematurely & should have never ever, never used MP2 that soaks up far too much valuable bandwidth rendering it costly to broadcast. Memory & processing is still improving as cost is dropping. Digital radio could use better codecs that automatically get downloaded every few years, months in advance of any switchover to the new codec without being too costly. Internet radio has its uses but but soaks up bandwidth on a mobile network.

Talking of radio – a very small percentage of bandwidth allocated to different uses is actually used at any one time. Eventually, Cognitive Radio may well free up huge amounts of bandwidth as a possible extension to Software Defined Radio that’s currently used my mobile phones & military comms. CR could be implemented in stages with gaps across the entire spectrum saved for standard radio. CR could be very wide bandwidth in its purist form so various current users would have to give up their cherished slices of the spectrum. It’s called Cognitive Radio as transmitters have to know about the local radio traffic & atmospheric conditions to switch channels & give priority to certain uses such as military or emergency services. Blue Tooth is another example of SDR.

Looking even further ahead we maybe re-engineering ourselves to include mobile comms or music/video playback straight into our minds. In the meantime, plain vanilla implants will have to do!

 

[matthewpiano]

Compared to other household appliances the amount of electricity that audio visual equipment uses is negligible. Its the white goods etc. that will need to get dramatically more energy efficient.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I think the issue with digital is related to the format, but is not actually the format - if that makes any sense.

The problem with 44.1/16 is that it's very easy to make it sound awful. Most of the information you need is present, but encoding and decoding is fraught with dangers that simply are not there for 192/24. Personally I play 44.1/16 via optical into a rate converter (to upconvert to 88.1 and re-time) and then into a DAC.

However it's the loudness war that does by far the most damage - seriously - most music on a CD these days is a continuous brick of sound - in a waveform editor it's like looking at a plank of wood. It started as a way to get some life into the sound of a CD, but has ended up making some songs sounding simply laughable. New rock bands are a good example, you can hear them break into a 'loud' bit of the song but it's at the same level as the quiet bits so it just sounds stupid. Eliminating dynamics and exitement from music is a strange way of marketing it.

Both the difficult-to-use-right format and the loudness war are under the control of the record companies and these are the reasons by MP3 has taken off IMO. When the CD doesn't sound any better than an MP3 most people have chosen the MP3, and 'CD Quality' for people in the know has become a a point of jokes and sarcasm. I often read a review of a CD player where I known how many thousand clips that CD has, and therefore know that most of the review is a commentary on how good the overload capability of the DAC is rather than anything useful.

So Hi-Fi is facing problems of 'mass recorded music just isn't very exciting anymore' - coupled with a dumbing down of the equipment into a 'more expensive = better' pitch that tends to overshadow the more technical aspects. Amplifiers for instance - a very important part but you really have to search high and low to find a decent one, and that's not because of the cost, it's because we now have a string of 'designers' who know basic electronics but nothing about audio.

Of course the disastrous THD doesn't help either - an appalling measure that assumes that the 2nd harmonic is just as important as the 9th, despite the fact that one sounds nice and the other sounds awful. Equipment reviews don't help either - too much fluff and subjective opinion - a measure of TIM, an FFT of 1kHz at various powers and a double blind test with some compatriots would give a far better picture of the sound.

My Hi-Fi has gone rather more DIY than most now, speaker wires from OFC car audio cable (Maplins), Usher X-718 speakers (chosen at a hi-fi show) and an SEP tube amp powered by the amazing GU50. Putting on something like 'Lilac Wine' (Melua - one of the rare good recording+mastering) is like being there and still sounds better than anything ever heard in a hi-fi shop - regardless of price. For me, the future of hi-fi is greater control over what happens at each stage, and going back to basics. By basics I mean speakers, amplifier, source - and in that order. So while many are conning into tinkering with stupid main cables and blowing their money on yet another CD player I'm listening to the effects of silver mica capacitors or changing the biasing, 'rolling' tubes or even designing new toplogies.

The future of hi-fi for me is listening to old music on new stuff I designed and/or improved myself