Thoughts on Sound Quality and Music

[Rocker]

For many years I had the plan, that if I won the Lottery, I would buy a SOTA hi-fi system, with room correction etc. Something along the lines of Krell/Wilson Audio and so on. Now I am not so sure that I would do this if I found that money was no object.

My father and his siblings all played music. Most of my cousins also play music, trad Irish, Country, Old Time Waltzes and the like. My siblings also play as we grew up absorbing the music as lots of musicians called to our house to play. This is a tradition that I carry on to this day.

The Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s was a different place to what it is today. The country had ONE radio station, Radio Eireann, and it broadcast very little music and any it did seemed to be of the Deliah Murphy type of singing. It took the [sadly much derided] Showbands and pirate radio stations to bring modern pop, rock and country to the country as a whole. In my parents home, all we had was a Bush valve radio. My father bought a stand alone cassette tape recorder to record new tunes that visitors played. And a few pre recorded tapes of accordionists Joe Burke, Finbarr Dwyer and Tony McMahon, to which I added Simon & Garfunkel, Ray Lynam & The Hillbillies and Johnny Cash [when I started earning money in my own right]. Yet I liked listening to the radio and I 'got' the music played through the cassette deck even if the speaker was small and tiny.

Later I bought my first hi-fi system, a Trio turntable, Trio amplifier, Akai cassette deck and a S/H pair of Phillips MFB speakers. The MFB name referred to motion feed back [whatever that meant], and it sounded way better than either the radio or the stand alone cassette deck. Fast forward many years and I have put a good number of hi-fi systems through my hands and I still listen to music through my current system.

A couple of weeks ago our family met up at my Brother-in-laws for a post Christmas dinner and a musical evening. My B-I-L had setup his smartphone to run a Spotify playlist of Christmas Carols and songs, the headphone output fed into a bass [guitar] amp. I would have thought that such a system would sound poor but I was wrong. It sounded better than good, effectively a mono system, one with limited high frequencies, yet well known Carols such as 'O Holy Night', 'Silent Night' and songs like 'Jingle Bell Rock' sounded almost Divine. And No it was not the wine as I don't drink alcohol.

Which brings me to the point of this post: Sound Quality -v- Music, and is there a definite link between the two? I am not convinced that there is as I notice that when listening to our hi-fi system, I am as much taken with the audio picture presented as with the music being played. There was no audio picture on the bass amp system or indeed either the valve radio or the stand alone cassette deck alluded to earlier, to me the audio picture distracts from the music rather than adding to the experience as I would have expected.

Writing the above seems like heresy to us hi-fi people but I have not 'got' much from hi-fi for many years. It took until now to actually define and admit it. Admitting it to myself and you all has freed me up to listen to lo-fi systems and to get to the kernel of the reason we listen to our systems. It is the music that is important, the hardware involved is incidental to the end result. Most or all you guys have systems that are vastly better than mine, I have been stunned by the sounds at Frans, Dereks, Ivors and Kens. And at hi-fi shows too. And I look forward to visiting those houses again to hear more of the same.

I keep asking myself, do I really need a one hundred K plus Euro system to listen to Christy Moore, Tony Joe White, The Eagles, Dire Straits, Rory Gallagher? I look forward to reading your thoughts on this terrifying question. Thanks for reading this far.

[Sloop John B]

And then there is our hearing.

My hearing is like that on the Specsavers ad with dancing in the moonlight which kind of negates the need to obsess over cables etc. I can now dial in micro details by increasing the treble on them a bit and have no need to tame with speaker cable what I can tame with a flick of the volume switch.

I’d be surprised if many of us here over 55 couldn’t do with a house curve to make up for some high frequency hearing loss.

Having said that when my music room becomes the spare room when we have visitors and I’m “reduced” to a pair of KEF LS50W2 for my music listening it is always very pleasurable to fire back up my Naim system again but it does not mean I didn’t enjoy music whilst the room was out of bounds.

Then there is the undoubted hobby factor. I’ve enjoyed mixing in and out boxes over they years, comparing ladder and delta sigma DACs and HQP and chord upsampling.

Now I’m more at the stage of hoping things don’t break or need servicing and just stay working for as long as possible.

.sjb

[Fran]

I think its all subjective.....

take the evening with your BIL - the music was important, but was it as important as the gathering and craic? I would say you could have had your tinny cassette deck there and it would have been as good. I've seen similar but with someone just playing off the loudspeaker in their phone and it was great!!

So I would contend you don't need a fancy system to enjoy music..... but I know when I sit down of an evening and put the feet up and play some tracks through the setup here I really enjoy it..... so at those times the effort of putting it all together is all worth it.

[Diapason]

Good post, Rocker.

I have "views" about this, but basically it boils down to 2 separate but related hobbies for me: 1 is music, 2 is audio. I can easily enjoy one without the other, and indeed I spend a lot of time in summer listening to music on a small Bluetooth speaker outside and happy doing it. That said, there is a sounds quality level that I can't comfortably go below, and it changes with the programme material. For simple three chord rock music almost anything will do. For more complex music, or more dynamic music, or music with more subtlety, it's harder for me to get to a level of real enjoyment without a decent level of audio performance too. That's what got me here in the first place, and it persists now.

Still, with the right music I can get goosebumps no matter what the playback, qnd long may it last.

You know that I got rid of the big rig a few years back, mainly with the excuse of turning the nerd cave into a playroom for the girls. In reality, while I miss aspects of it, I wouldn't want it back as it caused as much torment as pleasure. I might get sucked back into the audio hobby again, but I'm never going back to that place.

[Ivor]

Something I've often mulled over too, early and often... My first point is that you wont get a great system by just spending big bucks. I've seen (heard?) this so many times. Most of us spend what we can and depend on synergy to gain the best. Big budget won't change that.

Now.. listening to your BIL's PA system after Xmas dinner is a million miles from sitting down to LISTEN to music you choose to listen to.

For simple three chord rock music almost anything will do.

I thought that once - then I listened to London Calling on a good system. About 7 more layers of relevant detail were revealed!
Tony Joe White and Christy more albums ae generally well produced "musical" albums. Christy "Live at the Point" is one of my favourite LPs - because the production captures the nuances.
The music is first - or should be, and then the chase for the best reproduction if that's important to you.