Sanity Check

[mourip]

34 minutes ago, plissken said:

Not sure where people miss the Fidelity part of hi-fi. 

 

I am curious what you have in mind by fidelity.

 

Faithful to the original performance? Faithful to the recording? Sounds good/real/convincing?

 

How would one know? Seems pretty subjective even if you had been sitting at the original performance.

[mourip]

3 hours ago, marce said:

Wot goes in comes out louder, nothing added nothing taken away, its not a hard concept really is it and what the hobby as been based on, or was certainly when I started out.

 

How do you know when nothing has been added or taken away? Your only frame of reference can be the system you are listening on.

 

The music is the reference but it does not really exist without the playback system. 

 

The point is that "high fidelity" is a moving target and the bottom line is that each of us decides what it is and where we stop in searching for it.

 

Some good points were made by others about measuring however probably 0.00001 percent of audiophiles have that equipment so we are all left with our built in subjective evaluation devices...our ears. We can buy equipment that has lots of graphs that look good but a system is usually more than the sum of it's parts. At that point we all decide what sounds good to us. "High Fidelity" is a concept and we all decide when we reach it.

 

My guess is that as someone stated above improvements come pretty quickly until about $10K but by $20 we are left with "a hundred shades of great". When we call it quits is a product more of pocketbook and personal preference than oscilloscopes.

[mourip]

2 hours ago, mansr said:

I would never buy a component that didn't measure well, seeing as moderately priced gear achieves this with ease. What I ultimately choose then comes down to aesthetics, availability, and price.

 

I assume that like many of us who pursue "fidelity" you have owned a procession of different pieces of equipment. What drove you to replace what you had and how was that determined?  Did you buy anything that measured well but had disappointing sound in your system?

 

What is your system now? Your profile just says "Electronics". It would be instructive for us to know what you consider to be equipment that produces fidelity as you define it.