Your vote: Most Useless Audio Adjective

PRaT (First of all, forget "acceleration" -- that was only thrown in there after the fact to try and save a shred of dignity. OK: pace, rhythm and timing are all separate qualities applying to *music*, not reproduced sound. Each means something different from the others, musically speaking, so lumping them all together as going hand in hand just underscores how empty this acronym truly is. For instance, when was the last time you heard anyone talk about an interconnect that had ‘great timing’ but ‘lousy rhythm’? And since when can an amplifier affect the tempo -- which is what ‘pace’ is -- of a piece of music? So it’s meaningless in the literal sense, but as figurative shorthand for the more precisely descriptive, actual audio qualities for which it substitutes, I think most audiophiles get the drift of it, though as a catch-all it glosses over the details and doesn’t do anything to help educate neophytes about what really might be going on.)

Bloom, bloomy (Flowers bloom. No one has any idea what this means about gear, or everyone has a different idea.)

Musical, musicality (Biggest cop-out ever invented. Doesn’t tell anybody anything about the way something sounded, just that the reviewer didn't think it sucked.)

Liquid, liquidity (The opposite of a liquid is either a solid or a gas -- does live music sound like any of these things? Nobody describes sound as being “gassy” thank goodness, and “solid” is usually a positive term for bass or imaging. Again, no one knows what the hell this really means, just that it's supposed to be good. Watch out it doesn’t get on your pants.)

Analog-like (Said only about digital. Except, apparently, in the case of the Music Direct: the latest catalog they sent me actually describes the new Clearaudio cartridges as "now voiced for an overall sense of analog-like warmth and richness". Did I mention this was in reference to a cartridge?)

Digital, digital-like (Means anything bad.)

Solid-state-like (Can be somewhat good, except when said of a solid-state piece of gear.)

Tube-like (Means anything good. Surprised Music Direct hasn’t used this to describe tube amps. Not to be confused with “tubey”, a perfectly good term for describing a tubed piece of gear that sounds archetypically like same, but a laughable term for describing anything else.)

Electrostatic-like (Means the reviewer has conflicted feelings about the fact that deep down he knows he wouldn’t be content if he actually owned electrostatic speakers.)

Bright (Everything is too bright for audiophiles. Bright is the bane of an audiophile's life -- the very reason he is an audiophile, yet also the reason he’s never happy as an audiophile. The future of an audiophile is so bright he’s gotta wear earmuffs.)

Warm, warmth (Audiophiles and reviewers are forever conflating this term. Simplistically put, one meaning is a tonal balance generally favoring lower frequencies over higher ones, or to a degree generous in the lower mids. The other meaning indicates a pleasing if additive harmonic profile, from gear favoring lower- and even-order distortion products while avoiding higher- and odd-order ones. The two qualities are unrelated, but the distinction is almost ever noted.)

Continuousness (What can really be said about this one?…There’s a special place in hell for reviewers who make up indefinable words to supersede other indefinable words they made up.)

Laid-back (Dude, where’s my system?)

Delicate (Ssshhh, turn it down or you’ll break it. And “delicacy” is something you eat.)

Sweet, sweetness (I am a bitter, bitter man.)

Plays the tune (I suppose lesser gear plays whatever the hell it feels like.)

Gets the notes and beats right (The only person alive who might know what this means is the one reviewer who says it, but I strongly doubt it.)

Organized (Another one-reviewer special, for anal-retentives only. Oops, that’s all of us. Wish it described my record collection though.)

Action (A questionable term coined by yet another reviewer who's been endlessly defining it for us in every review he's written for at least several years, and still nobody uses it but him.)

Lit from within (Yeah, I’ll be you are!)

Midrange magic (No treble, and certainly no bass.)

SET-like (Means inferior to my SET, except for those many ways in which it is objectively superior.)

All things considered something of a bargain (Paging Bill Gates.)

Black background (This is what music arises out of, kids.)

Translucent (Larvae and pupae can be translucent. Anybody? Didn’t think so.)

Ruthlessly revealing (What something is not. Break glass to use immediately after telling how neutral, fast, extended, resolving and transparent something is, so we don’t run away screaming.)

But if you’re in the market for XXXXXXX, I can certainly recommend that you should go hear it for yourself and form your own opinion (Oh man, I can't tell you what a waste of time that would be! No, I mean I literally cannot tell you that.)

Thanks Joe, but "Pipe-and-Slippers"? What, did you grow up learning about hi-fi from Playboy? Hmmm -- guess if one does the supertweeter-addition thing with Quads, then you've got Pipe-Slippers-and-a-Golden-Retriever speakers ;^)

Marco: Well, it's quite obvious we can't consider seriously anything you have to say about expanding the Pipe'n'Slippers program. To imply that it will take Stereophile as long as "a few years" to feature another Musical Fidelity product on their cover just totally destroys any credibility you may have had with your Flying Monkeys and your Close'n'Play ;^)

I think "mid-fi" is mostly a marketing term (as opposed to a sonic descriptive), usually understood to mean a brand (as opposed to a piece of gear) that is intended to bridge the presumed gap in sound, design, appearance and price between mass-market gear and hi-end audiophile gear. As a marketing, pricing, engineering and styling approach, mid-fi has been typified by brands such as NAD, Rotel, Adcom and Parasound. Whether this hierarchy of brand and price actually correlates directly with sound quality -- especially at the lower and higher ends of the mid-fi price scale, where there can be considerable overlap with the higher and lower ends of the mass-market and high-end price scales, respectively -- is another question, one for which the answer is probably often taken for granted. Although I've used the term mid-fi myself in these forums, one problem I can see with it is that it could be taken to imply that hi-end necessarily equals hi-fi (high fidelity) and mass-market necessarily equals lo-fi, both very questionable assumptions.