As I predicted the only negative feedback has been from those who don't value accuracy as the highest aim of "hi-fi", and don't agree with my philosophy on this subject.
The following excerpt is from a review that Jonathon Valin recently did on an expensive Magico speaker.
He is a much more eloquent writer than I am and his piece on accuracy which sets up the review is very interesting. From the Absolute Sound July2011.
Jonathan Valin
If it does nothing else (and it does plenty else), the
Magico Q5—the current top-line, full-range, fourway
dynamic loudspeaker from the Berkeley-based
company that has, over the last four years, shaken up the
status quo in the ultra-high end—cuts straight to the core
of what we mean when we say something is a “highfidelity”
component.
This is the very issue that led to the foundation of this
magazine, and the position that Harry Pearson staked out
almost forty years ago has been a beacon and a bone of
contention ever since. Should “high fidelity” components,
as HP argued, aim to reproduce the sound of acoustic
(i.e., unamplified) instruments as they are heard in life in
a concert or recital hall? Or, in a significant variant of the
absolute sound approach, should they reproduce precisely
what was recorded on the disc, whether that sounds
like the absolute sound (as it ideally should) or not? Or
should they aim at something else again, something far
less prescriptive and more personal? Should they simply
(or perhaps not so simply) consistently please whoever
listens to them?
Although these views aren’t mutually exclusive, over
the years they have typically been cast as if they were,
as if they represented opposing sides in a never-ending
battle between the forces of “realism,” “accuracy,”
and “musicality.” All three positions are rife with
contradictions, all three share certain patches of common
ground, and all three have been “shaped,” like battlefields,
to reflect the prejudices of individual reviewers and
listeners. The absolute sound school, for example, has
trouble dealing with amplified music, such as rock ’n’
roll, which in today’s world makes its proponents seem
old-fogeyish. After all, what is the “absolute sound” of
a Fender Stratocaster or Telecaster? By the same token,
will a speaker that delivers the whomp of a Fender
Precision bass guitar as it sounds at a rock concert via
a Marshall stack also do justice to the pitches, timbres,
and dynamics of an unamplified cello or doublebass? For
that matter, will an “accurate” system tend to make both
Fender bass and cello sound a bit too cold and analytical,
like an unretouched glamour shot?
There is no single answer to these (and a zillion other)
questions that will satisfy all music lovers, which is
precisely why I try to take the biases of different kinds
of listeners into account whenever I write a review. The
way I see it most of us fall into one of three basic groups:
what I call the “absolute sound” listeners (who prefer
music played by acoustical instruments recorded in a real
space, and gear that makes those instruments—no matter
how well or poorly they were recorded—sound more like
“the real thing”); the “fidelity to mastertapes” listeners
(who want their music, acoustical or electronic, to sound
exactly as good or as bad, as lifelike or as phony as the
recording, engineering, and mastering allow); and the “as
you like it” listeners (who care less about the absolute
sound of acoustical instruments in a real space or about
fidelity to mastertapes and simply want their music to
sound some form of “good,” which is to say exciting,
beautiful, forgiving, non-fatiguing). Though I think these
groupings are valid, I also think that no listener is purely
one type or another, i.e., the fidelity to mastertapes listener
also wants his music to sound like the real thing, when the
recording allows; the absolute sound listener wants his music
to sound beautiful, when the music or orchestration allows; the
“as you like it” listener puts excitement and beauty ahead
of fidelity to sources, but is not at all unhappy when those
sources also sound like the real thing as he defines it. What
I haven’t been as clear about, perhaps, is where I stand in
this triumvirate—and why.
I stated my opinion on this crucial topic about twenty
years ago when I wrote a book about RCA recordings,
and in spite of occasional forays into other kinds of
listening I haven’t really changed my mind. Since The
RCA Bible has been out of print for a very long time, let
me quote what I had to say way back when:
“How much of the ‘absolute sound’ of an orchestra
does a microphone really capture? Well, it’s a fact that
microphones differ significantly from the response
of the human ear. Throughout the fifties and into the
sixties Mercury Records, for instance, used German
microphones (Telefunken 201’s and Neumann M 50’s)
with a rising high end. Are Mercury’s ‘living presence’
recordings [from Watford Town Hall] actual transcriptions
of the sound of the LSO with Dorati at the helm, or
are they the products of hot mikes—ones that added a
little upper-midrange sheen and bite to the LSO strings,
winds, and brass—or are they some incalculable blend
of both?
“Well, you’d have to have been at the Watford Town Hall to
know for sure. And even then, you’d have to have been sitting
where the microphones were placed. And since you don’t hear
in three channels mixed down to two and your chair’s not tall
enough to put you where the mike heads were located and your
ears have a different frequency balance and directional pattern
than mikes, you’d be hearing sounds that were different from
those which the microphones recorded. How different? The
question is unanswerable. On the basis of a recording we can
never know what the LSO ‘really’ sounded like on a particular
afternoon, on a particular piece of music. All we can know is
what the tape heads recorded.”
Twenty years on, I stand by what I wrote. For me high fidelity
means fidelity not to the absolute sound and not to some idealized
sound but to the sound of the mastertapes, which still seems to
me to be the one and only “truth” we’ve got. That this truth is
inevitably a compromise that will be further compromised in
playback is simply the way the recording/playback process works.
To achieve high fidelity as I define it means that the
loudspeakers and everything else in the playback chain need to
“disappear” as sound sources. To accomplish this, they must
be neutral, transparent, high in resolution, seamless in top-tobottom
coherence, low in distortion, and capable of a high degree
of realism rather than romance. As beguiling as such things can
sometimes sound, pieces of gear that impose a beauteous or
exciting or forgiving sonic template on the presentation—and,
thus, don’t disappear—are, in spite of any other virtues, finally
not for me. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t or shouldn’t be for
you. I have no argument with friends and colleagues who prefer
a less “neutral” component, either because they think a more
bespoke presentation makes music more like the real thing (as,
for example, those “absolute sound” types who eq their systems
to roll off the treble and/or boost the bass—or who prefer
equipment that effectively does the same thing because of builtin
dips and boosts in frequency response) or because they think
a romantic presentation makes recorded music more attractive
and, well, “musical.”
What I do have an argument with is calling such presentations
“high fidelity.” By my lights anything that makes you more aware
of the way sources are being colored and distorted by your system
is, ipso facto, less of a true high-fidelity component and more of
a tone control. I don’t want to hear my equipment automatically
adding virtues or subtracting flaws from every record (even
from records that benefit by such additions and subtractions); I
want to hear what is on the recording, good, bad, or indifferent,
because, as I just argued, the recording is the one indisputable
truth that stereo systems can be faithful to. The way I see it,
if you’re unhappy with the sound of the LPs and CDs you’re
playing back, then don’t try to correct the problems with your
stereo system. Instead, go out and buy better records.
My position has had certain undeniable consequences when
it comes to the kind of playback gear I prefer and how I set
it up. While as a reviewer I’ve recommended any number of
different kinds of loudspeakers for different kinds of listeners
(and was sincere in these recommendations), as a civilian I’ve
always owned electrostats, planars, and (occasionally) twoways.
Why? Because they were (and in many respects still are)
the lowest-distortion, lowest-coloration, highest-resolution,
most transparent-to-sources, least-present-in-their-own-right
transducers—the “highest-fidelity” speakers, if you will, by my
standard of high fidelity.
