The term 'Hi-Fidelity' is used to describe an audio system that reproduces a recording played on the system in a way that is a highly faithful representation of the recording itself.

Apart from technical specifications, the test of how 'hi-fi' a system sounded was how realistically instruments and voices were reproduced in comparison to the real thing. Assuming the recording itself is of high quality, and not the limting factor, does the piano sound like an authentic piano. ie is it a Steinway or Yamaha? Does the cello sound like the real thing? etc.

However my feeling is that the term hi-fi in the context of nearly all non acoustic music (especially electronic styles ie dance, trance, rap, tecno, doof etc) is somewhat of a misnomer.

How can one judge whether or not the reproduction of these styles of music is faithful?
ie How can one judge the faithfulness of a scratch effect or synthesised bass line or electronic high-hat or string pad?

So if one only listens to these styles of music should the term hi-fidelity be then considered redundant in it's meaning?
This is not to suggest that the quest for a subjectively good sounding system (to the listener) is a waste of effort but how one can equate this to the term 'hi-fidelity' ?

Okay! Flame away!!

so you started a thread to start a fight, or shall we call it an in-depth conversation, your not by any chance bored are you??

its a semi-valid point but isnt it general concensus that the true sound of electrical music isnt very clean anyway and the better your hi-fi system is the worse the music sounds (to an extent).

Also you can judge a scratch effect to an extent but its not a note is more of a slur in the music so it doesnt have to be clean or crisp anyway.

*finds a pot to stir*

What is hi-fi? Something you'll never achieve in a vehicle.

I think Hi Fi is used to describe a system which reproduces 20Hz to 20kHz with reasonable accuracy. Otherwise 99% of what you can buy (regardless of price) is not worthy of the HiFi label.

I will have to agree that attempting to achieve a HI-FI car stereo and listening to TECHNO is ridicules.
However, the term HI-FI in my mind is what you say, an accurate reproduction of the recorded material. If you listen to dance, trance, rap, tecno, doof etc then there may be some piece of mind knowing that the crap sound you are hearing is the same crap that was recorded.

Well, two points.

1. Hifi is *not* about getting a flat, accurate response from 20Hz-20kHz. That's what professional monitoring is about, and it definitely isn't what Hifi users are about. Hifi - and most home systems - are about making a more "flattering" sound. Usually they have a little more bottom end than they should, and often a bit of a boost in the upper mids.

2. Electronic music isn't about reproducing actual, acoustic instruments, but that certainly doesn't mean SQ becomes meaningless. Assuming you're going on the elitist "Real music comes from real instruments" trip, consider this. Your 'real' instruments are anything but pure, featuring instrument body rattles and resonances, room ambience, and a lot of enharmonic content. The sounds in electronica are generally a lot more pure, often being generated directly from osciallators at discrete, tuned tones. One might argue that there is less point in working towards SQ when you're starting with such complicated and 'dirty' instruments to begin with ;-)

Of course I'm talking extremes - I'm about as into a good Boesendorf recording as the next sound guy. Just don't think that people who listen to music you don't can't have any taste as far as SQ goes :-)

Hifi is *not* about getting a flat, accurate response from 20Hz-20kHz.
That statement is so silly it’s hardly worth responding to but some things just get my go up so much I just gotta stand up.
So your idea of sound reproduction is that every audio system should colour the recorded material?
I suggest to stick to your Ipod and your high end $25 headphones.

Electronic music isn't about reproducing actual, acoustic instruments, but that certainly doesn't mean SQ becomes meaningless.
Where is the quality to begin with? What are you compareing it too?
If there is no reference to guide your ears then how can you suggest one system is better than the other?

Sound reproduction is a personal thing. NO QUESTION but don't even try to suggest that electronic music is music. Granted, conventional instruments are anything but pure, but the what I look for is hearing the difference between a grand piano and a string strung to a log.

I think you're barking up the wrong tree! Now what's wrong with a good log?
Think of it as roots music with grain. Just ask Woody Guthrie!

mmm, tea chest Bass, now that's a string strung low.

Actually, I'm a pro audio engineer, and have about 15 years' experience in the field. Good audio *monitoring* is about a flat frequency response from 20Hz-20kHz. That's what you mix on in a studio.

Good home systems are about making your music sound good. They are *not* about accurate reproduction. Why do you think audio studios don't use hifi gear? It's because when you're mixing, you're not wanting a 'flattering' sound like hifi gear gives, but an *accurate* sound. They're very different goals.



Here's the real problem. You seem to think that if instruments are newer than 50 years in age, they're not making music. And I suppose that there's no skill in creating electronic music, since the computer writes it all for you, as well?

I think we should stick to beating rocks against one another. Obviously, that's the only real music, and anything newer than rocks is simply noise.

Hi Fi = art of playing back recorded music

Simple as that. Artwork is subject to interpretation and personal taste, Hi Fi is no different in that respect.

Topic closed.

I'm stuck between Ikerr and xen here.

Basically, music is like a piece of art.

xen, your at the mixing end, the "painter" so to speak, you have the creative input. So as such you require a blank canvas, or a nice flat, dead room with a nice EQ to provide 20-20 +/-0.5db.

ikerr, as the consumer, you want your system to suit your personal taste, reflect what you like to hear. Its like painting that wall a different colour to acompany that fine painting of xen's.

its long and crap, but thats my theory as a Live/Recording engineer

Agreed, Ole.

Actually at home I much prefer listening to music on hifi gear - it makes stuff sound better :-)

But that's it - while you mix on reference monitors, you know roughly what things will sound like in a crap car, in a nice car, on a home system, over AM radio, etc. The whole point is that you need a good reference to work from, or you don't know where you are.

E.g. Yamaha NS-10s, or those standard little Auratones (Horrortones). They're pretty flat frequency-response-wise, but sound very crappy. The whole point is you mix stuff so it sounds decent on them, and then you know they're going to sound good everywhere else.

Most good studios provide more than one set of monitors Usually the main speakers are a good set of full-range monitors to represent the whole spectrum. Plus a smaller pair of near fields, to give you a better idea of stereo imaging and a better idea of 'small system' sound.

I guess my point is that there is no absolute reference for audio monitoring. Systems are designed for specific reasons. Home systems (traditionally called 'hifi') are designed to make music sound good to the listener. *Not* to provide a flat frequency response ;-)

I thought it was always agreed that most people find a 'flat' response pretty crappy sounding? Personally, I find it works for say, DVD movie playback, but music is totally different. Then again it could be said Bose were fine for DVD movie playback......


Personally, I think HiFi is about a faithful reproduction of the recorded material. Not nesc a 100% accurate reproduction, but faithful to the original. If the recorded material is electronic, percussion, brass, strong, whatever. Its still a sound, and thats all a record/CD/DVD is, a collection of sounds. I studied music theory, as well as playing various 'real' instruments, and to be honest after all my exposure to live sound, I have never found electronic music less talented or any lesser of a genre because of its synthetic source.

My 2.2c (GST incl)

When i enter a studio the first thing i do is hit the "bypass" function on their eq, or instert my own instead to get the room sounding how i like it.

same gos for home hi-fi and large scale PA gigs.

Flat = the ghey

Anacohic chambers = the ghey/confusing as hell

anacohic chambers + 1sec delay = mental freak out

Isnt it anechoic?

Whys the anechoic chamber + a delay a freak out..theres no echoes to deal with

My spelling sucks

ok, imagine trying to talk with no reverb AT ALL, then suddenly a second later your hear what you said. Its hard to imagine until you do it. But your brain just cant cope with the situation.

it requires a mic, a delay unit and a speaker to work *basically.*

Ooo..that'd be fun. wouldnt you get a infinite feedback loop happening though? Speaker + mic in room, input speaker, output mic, feedback.

pffft

you lose!

welcome to the world of delay! also in a room with no reflections you can get that signal hot.

Its also got a lot to do with gain theory etc.

Ie i can stand direcly in front of a speaker and get it damn load before it feeds back

all to do with mic selection and a little EQing

I can imagine that for individual words, but a strung-together sentence? Annnyyywayy. lol.

ont make me come over there and slap you!

According to Wikipedia...

"High fidelity or hi-fi reproduction is a quality standard that means the reproduction of sound or images is very faithful to the original..."

Fidelity = faithfulness or truthfulness
High Fidelity = faithfulness or truthfulness to a high standard

So the true connotation of the term 'Hi-Fi' means accurate reproduction of the source material not 'enhanced' or 'souped up' reproduction

Of course electronic music is music. Think about what you just called it 'electronic music'.

Now, I think it's abit of an over generalisation to suggest that there is no point in having a good souding system if you want to listem to electronic music - thats like saying there is no point in buying an S class if you are going to drive on bad roads.

Sure, a Merc will not make bad roads feel smooth. Doesn't mean they will feel better in a 20 year old Fiat though.

I'm building my system for SQ, and while i listen to tons of different stuff ranging from Dire Straights to Tupac to Boyz II Men, to Sash. I can assure you, the electronic stuff sounds much better on my Rainbows (when properly set up) then it did on my old entry level Morels.

Electronic music aint the best recorded stuff, it will still benifit from a good sound system and install.. but obviously not even a set of Grand Utopias will turn a bad recording into an Audiophille one...that's obivous.

Mmm, anechoic chambers :-)

These were the wet dream of 70s engineers.

Actually, the reason people freak out in them is because you stop hearing two sounds you've been hearing since the moment you were born.

The first is the reverb on your heart beating.

The second is the reverb from your brain's electrical activity.

Suddenly they both stop, and peoples' brains don't like it much :-)

...Yeah okay xen.

Not true. According to Wikipedia...

"High fidelity or hi-fi reproduction is a quality standard that means the reproduction of sound or images is very faithful to the original..."

In fact the term High Fidelity itself is self explanetary...
Fidelity = faithfulness or truthfulness
High Fidelity = faithfulness or truthfulness to a high standard

Sure it's true that most people prefer a 'coloured' sound to an accurate sound.
I'm not arguing that point at all. My point is that the true connotation of the term 'Hi-Fi' means accurate reproduction of the source material not 'enhanced' or 'souped up' reproduction. Therefore a true Hi-Fi system should be exactly what an accurate studio monitoring system should be... with the exception of NS10's, 'Horribletones' (Auratones) and many others!

Over time popular culture alters the intended meaning of a term or phrase resulting in a completely new interpretation.
It's like the myth that becomes a rumour, and the rumour that becomes fact.
Most manufacturers have labelled almost everything audio ever made as being Hi-Fi or 20hz-20khz frequency response, or 1000watts PMPO or whatever! Hell, I've even seen a $19.95 clock radio with a 1.5" speaker labelled 'Hi-Fi' so no one can claim exclusivity to the term 'Hi-Fi'. And that's part of the problem. Almost anything can be called 'Hi-Fi' whether it sounds good or bad, is accurate or not. So the term has become 'distorted' (pun intended) and it's real meaning lost.



Here is where you missed my point completely... but I kind of expected at least one person to.
If one uses their ears to determine the subjective accuracy of an audio system then we need a reference... agreed? First of all every acoustic ('real' as you say) instrument generates harmonics along with the fundamental frequency. "...instrument body rattles and resonances, room ambience, and a lot of enharmonic content..." Yes, yes and yes!
If it didn't there would be no way to tell a violin from a trumpet or a piano from a kazoo.

So if we put a piano or cello or whatever in an acoustic space and have a compentant musican play the instrument we hear sound... correct?
We hear all the "...instrument body rattles and resonances, room ambience, and a lot of harmonic content..."
Okay now assuming we can faithfully record this instrument playing in this acoustic environment (of course microphones are almost as weak a link as loudspeakers are for colouration... but I digress) so we now have an accurate (or Hi-Fi recording one hopes) which we can compare with the live performance. So what is the reference? Of course the actual live performance is the reference! The sound eminating from the strings and wood etc. etc. If we then could switch (A/B blind test) between the actual live performance and the recording of the performance we would then have some idea of how 'Hi-Fi' the system is. This same test was actually carried out in front of a live audience some years back using Duntech speakers I believe.

Okay now how do we achieve the same comparison using a purely electronic source?

Okay, first let me explain that most 'acoustic' recordings are mixed after being recorded.

Apart from mostly-classical live events, almost anything you've heard recorded has been recorded on a multitrack recorder of some kind. This means that the recording process is already removing the 'point of view' of the original listener's perspective. A good engineer will be placing the instruments they've recorded into a 3d space for the final mix. They will be placed both in terms of left to right panning, and distance from listener (using reverb, levels, and delay).

The only real exception to this is live classical recording, which is often made using an MS pair of microphones, to emulate a listener's position.

So 'real' and 'electronic' instruments are both, usually, re-placed by the mixing engineer relative to where they were in the room they were originally recorded in. That's if all of the parts were even played 'live' together in the first place (increasingly rare in itself).

What's the reference for electronica, you ask? Well, the original mix, as it was originally intended by the engineer. To go a little deeper (as I was implying above), the sources of electronic music are, ultimately, oscillators (which will generate pure sine / triangle / sawtooth / square / etc waveforms) and samples (which are recordings of other things, very often real instruments as well). So either pure oscillated waves, by definition the cleanest and purest sounds we know, or samples, which can be anything, including the acoustic instrument recordings you hold so dear.

The point I'm trying to make is that saying Hifi is about recreating the scene of the original recording is a bad assumption to begin with, since the vast majority of recordings didn't sound like the CD you're playing back in the first place.

Oh and another thing - reverb and effects, not to mention EQ, are applied, again, to the vast majority of recorded music. Does this not make them 'fake' as well, since these sounds aren't in the original space you recorded?

I come from a recording background as well. As you state apart from minimilast recording techniques using stereo mics, (coincident pairs, spaced pairs, M/S, Blumlein, Decca tree etc, etc. with M/S being the most accurate IMO) nearly all so called 'stereo' recordings we hear are not in fact true stereo but 'panned mono'. Yes and add all the Lexicon, TC-Electronics reverbs along with Pro-Tools plugins and that goes to creating all part of the illusion.

My reason for starting this thread was the gauge people's opinions as to their view of the meaning of 'Hi-Fi' and how one can judge the 'Hi-Fi'-ness of a system using pure electronic sounds as a reference. Sure the same could be said for processed 'real' sounds which can be just as 'unreal' as any purely electronic sound.

The origins of Hi-Fi begin with a bunch of DIY audio nuts who were disillusioned with the sound eminating from early audio systems... because it didn't sound like the real thing. Remember once upon a time the only way anyone heard music was live, not recorded, and my point is that the only true reference is a live performance... because if it is not, how can we judge the truthfulness of the source material?

FYI - I have a collection of Neumanns & AKG condensers along with some Neve gear amongst other things.
Is my Neve pre/eq accurate? Not on your life! But it sounds damn good especially with a Class 'A' modified output stage.

(Neumann U77 & KMS84i, AGK C60 tube & 4 x C451EB's etc. all coloured to different degrees!)

Mmmmm - Neve :-)

I learned to engineer on a Neve series V console. They do make some delightfully yummy sounding gear ;-)

My personal feeling is that the term 'Hifi' doesn't mean what it used to. Like you say, it was something 'early audiophiles' came up with, at a time when the standard consumer gear really didn't cut much chop. I think it's fair to say that even a very ordinary 5.1 system today is going to put to shame most systems from 40-50 years ago anyway.

BTW Pundit, sounds like we have very similar tastes in gear ;-) I found it pretty interesting when I first started to play with linear phase EQ modules. As you say, the Neve EQ is definitely coloured, but coloured in a really nice way. While the linear phase gear is lovely for some applications, I was surprised how much the phase distortion from the Neve EQs improved the sound, at least in mixing.

Interesting thread, glad you started it ;-)

Oh No!

Studio Geeks!!!!!11!!!one one one!!

*Olie throws a rug over his pro-tools system*

*Olie runs back to his FOH console* "Its ok baby, those nasty geeks cant touch you"

your spot on

Home systems KILL car systems, let alone ones at equal price ranges...