Another kind of 'compression' in high-end audio

Anyone who reads the average show report, the average review or any forum runs into the dreaded ‘blowed me away’ or “best I’ve ever heard” or even the infamous ‘best ever’ mixed with your usual sprinkle of awesomes and wows.

To some extent this is the fault of the English language – mathematics is much better at quantifying things. And certainly the culture at large, at least here in the U.S., encourages such obfuscation, equating, for example, the horror of killing 40M people with the local tax collector or the latest starlet driving too fast after a drinking a beer with – well, nothing holds a candle to this particular crime against humanity.

The point is that some audio equipment is significantly better than others, and some systems sound much better than others. Yet any causal, or even in depth, perusal of the information available would have one believe that everything is pretty darn great. That it is all about budget and aesthetics and what is ‘hot’ right now on the forums, or recommended by Stereophile or written up by some Joe who pins a ‘reviewer’ tag on their shirt.

Speaking of Stereophile, at least they TRY to classify things a little – though with their emphasis on measurements, their taking price into consideration, and their lack of long-term reviewing – their A, B, etc. grading is not so very useful. The Golden Ear Awards, as another example [not to pick on them… almost ALL of the online mags do something like this] is a completely random walk through components by people with completely random powers of observation and skill and experience.

I know, I know, people say that quality is in the ear of the beholder. I say that people who use this argument are lazy and are afraid of taking a stand 🙂 I say that there is indeed ABSOLUTE quality that is irrespective of listener and we may or may not be able to measure it today – most likely not – but that it is of a kind of quality that is *theoretically* measurable – that one can imagine that one might be able to measure it someday – given enough time, brains and money.

Sure, we all enjoy the Bose car stereo sometimes. Enjoy it a lot. Sometimes as much, say, as a $1M rig. We also might enjoy the smell of a wild rose in a random alley, as well as the gardens of La roseraie, say. One can hardly equate the quality of the two – but both can be equally enjoyable at certain times under certain circumstances. The point is that quality of audio should not be measured by whether someone MIGHT enjoy it once in awhile [one might make an argument that enjoyment over an EXTENDED period of time should be included in some kind of subjective quality measurement] – that there is an intrinsic quality that is NOT relative to the listener, just like the quality of a garden – that there are a number of measurable and not-yet measurable qualities that set a wild rose garden apart from one of the world’s most cared-for rose gardens. That there is difference between an amp, say, made by someone who then markets it on the forums versus someone who has spent their whole lives building amps and studying what good amps do and don’t do and who TRIES to do the best that CAN BE DONE at a price point, or on an acre, as opposed to ‘good enough’.

It is this contrast, of the not so good with the extremely excellent – that makes life wonderfully fascinating and I would say that the contrasts themselves are also quite… enjoyable. It gives life ‘color’ – these graduations in quality. And it is the descriptions of audio equipment, through incompetence, fear, duplicitousness, ignorance, hive mentality or whatever, who compress everything into a category of ‘good’ – that are drowning us in meaninglessness – that are robbing the hobby, and all of our audiophile lives, of some of its real potential for enjoyment.