Why HiFi? pt. 11

By: Gary Alan Barker

December 31st, 2020

As the end of 2020 shuffles in I find that it has been over a year since we started HiFiAudio.Guru and I have been writing these monthly ditties. Thanks to issues with our web designer HiFiAudio.Guru didn’t launch until February so this is only my eleventh entry even though it has been over a year for me as writer and editor. Of course, not long after we launched COVID-19 happened, audio shows went away and belts got tightened so we have not been able to bring you as many reviews as we would have liked to, but 2021 promises to be better as the world finally starts to get a handle on this disease and shows start up again.

Looking back at the year so far, I thought I would return to the original topic of this article; Why HiFi?

If you look in the dictionary you will find the definition of Fidelity listed as Faithfulness to a Cause or the Degree of Exactness with which something is copied or reproduced. And that is what being an audiophile is all about; wanting to not just listen to great music, but to experience as realistically as possible the original performance of that great music. Being in a room with the world’s greatest musicians and hearing what they heard when they performed the songs for the first time making them want to preserve that experience for others to appreciate.

HiFi of course can be applied to all forms of music reproduction, whether it be mono, two-channel or multi-channel, loudspeaker or headphone, but it is mostly applied to two-channel loudspeaker audio because that represents the most accurate reproduction of the listener’s experience at a performance. That may change in the future, if multi-channel recording changes focus to recreate that experience instead of creating an artificial field of sound from the musicians perspective, or if binaural recordings become more readily available for headphone listeners, but until then two-channel loudspeaker systems will remain the heart of audiophile listening much in the same way that analog will remain the core audiophile source until the recording industry catches of with bleeding-edge digital technologies. In the long run, the audiophile community is at the mercy of the recording industry and will be forced to maintain 1950’s technologies that harken back to a time when the recording industry was made up of audiophiles.

Bidding ado to HiFiAudio.Guru’s first year I wish you all the merriest of holidays and the very best in the new year to come.