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Musings from old school on High Fidelity

Old interview in Stereophile of JA interviewing G Holt.

Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?

Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.

Yet you achieved so much, Gordon.

I know I did, and my whole excuse for it—a love for the sound of live classical music—lost its relevance in the US within 10 years. I was done in by time, history, and the most spoiled, destructive generation of irresponsible brats the world has ever seen. (I refer, of course, to the Boomers.)

High Fidelity means REPRODUCTION with as little distorion and color as possible and a flat neutral FR within the range of human hearing that retains as much of the original source as possible. This day and age we have the ability to come close but we have chosen the path where High Fidelity means whatever subjective opinion I choose. It might be what one prefers but it isn't HiFi.
djones51

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djones51 OP
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Words have definitions, if we can’t agree on what words mean then communication breaks down.

HIGH FIDELITY
noun Electronics.

sound reproduction over the full range of audible frequencies with very little distortion of the original signal.

Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) frequency response within the human hearing range.

In radio, sound recording, etc., an approximately exact reproduction of sound achieved by low distortion and a wide range of reproduced frequencies, from approximately 20 to 20,000 hertz


High fidelity is not "my fidelity " it is not whatever I want it to be. I might not like sound reproduced as accurate and distortion free as possible but that’s what it means. The equipment that can reproduce the sound it is given with as little distorion or inaudible distortion comes the closest to being High Fidelity equipment no matter the price. High Fidelity Audio is dying even though we have equipment that can reproduce music more accurate than ever before we choose to be subjectivist and declare whatever we prefer HiFi.
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