Pursuing the Ultimate Music Experiences

A number of things are going on here behind the scenes.

The last month was one of our best months ever . Thank you, everybody, very much. We apprecitate your business and support.

We also anticipate being able to announce a major addition or two here any time now. Yes, it may involve speakers.

And the website, hopefully our internet guests (you!) enjoy our presentation of an audiophile’s-ear-view and audiophile’s-eye-view of ‘high technology in service of the music lover’. And hopefully it helps make worthy buying decisions.

We use a multidisciplinary approach using high quality digital photography guided by a couple of very passionate audiophiles (aka us), decades of professional software and HCI design research, combined with the near ubiquity of relatively high-bandwidth connectivity and relatively inexpensive large computer monitors.

The Audio Federation Home page on the new DELL 30007 FPW 30″ monitor.

A tremendous amount of effort is expended to make our webpages load as fast as possible, while keeping the quality of the site and content, and the resolution and size of the photos, at, hopefully, Oh-My-Gawd levels.

To this end we continue to update the website, adding gallery pages for many of the lines we carry (and some that we don’t), expanding the high-gloss Catalog, enhancing the magazine-style Price Lists, and growing the Recommended Systems review pages. It is not as good as actually hearing what something sounds like, but at least we will get to show you what it really looks like in addition to, succinctly, describing what it really sounds like.

Well, we try hard, anyway.

The Audio Federation Recommended Systems Page on the DELL 30″ monitor.

Enjoy!

Now, I should preface this by admitting that I do not know everything there is to know about video. But I do know some things; I read the trade magazines and forums and scope out various video technologies every so often, so I think my points will be valid, to some extent anyway.

This post was inspired by a casual thought I had that video technologies were objectively better at doing their job than audio technologies. That videophiles didn’t seem to have all these wars over how close XYZ technology was to being objectively real as opposed to being subjectively ‘somewhat like reality’.

But is this really true?

The idea here is to compare video technology to audio technology in terms of how close they are to reproducing the ‘real thing’.

Both technologies have products that are ‘warm’ (Pioneer Elite, some CRT projectors and I think LCOS as well).

Both technologies have products that are overly detailed (Mitsubishi, some might say DLP as well).

But in the audio world people often build systems for the types of music they like (rock & roll, classical, jazz all have different system profiles and only the best systems can do all genres well), but I am unaware of people designing their video systems to best display specific genres; say sci-fi movies, or love stories, or horror movies. Is this because video technologies all reproduce subject matter objectively so well, that they are way beyond this need to tailor the technology to the subject matter type?

I wonder….

Though they advertise that some of the new LCD display technologies are like ‘looking out a window’, they have not fooled a single person as far as I know (the 102 inch flat panel at CES was really amazing, but it wasn’t REAL. It wasn’t capable of fooling someone). But I have read of several audio demonstrations where people were easily fooled into thinking that the sound came from real musicans and not the stereo system behind the curtain which was really generating the sound.

Are our ears just more easily fooled?

Or is audio just inherently easier to reproduce?

I think that when the day comes that videophiles are arguing about video technologies that fool people into thinking, say, a persons face is real – but fool them in different ways – well, I imagine that day is still a goodly distance in the future.

Will they someday determine that enlarging the red pixels a little and shrinking the blue will make horror movies scarier?

So we audiophiles should be happy (yeah, right) that we have got it pretty darn good. We can reproduce the sound of a guitar, some singers, and most percussion so that it fools people, even people who are skilled listeners.

Not too shabby.

Well, it DOES take a system – otherwise no music comes out of them speakers.

And building a great sounding system takes time. It is not something everyone has the patience for, or the skill for, or desire for, or the time for.

I was remonded of this when a commercial came on TV for some, what I presume to be special in some way, brake pads. Yes, I am sure there are lots of people who shop the Auto Parts store and like to install custom brake pads on their automobile.

But I am not one of them. And I think the vast majority of people are like me.

So where does that put the ordinary person who does not want to put together a system a component at a time anymore than they want to put together a car a brake pad at a time?

We’ve talked about the system approach before, on both our Classic Systems page as well as our old Turnkey Systems page.

There are actually very few systems that really sound great – and they take awhile to find – but there are some. And most can be tailored a little bit one way or the other to suit the type of sound to suit the buyer (do you want all-season or performance tires, do you want a sunroof, do you want a nav or a dvd player, …).

To this end we are creating a Recommended Systems section that will list the systems we set up here that we think are killer in some way or another – and we will try to categorize the system’s sonic goals in the same way as was done in the Audiophile’s Guide’s sections on speakers, amps, CD players and preamps.

We are just starting the construction of the Recommended Systems pages – so if anyone has any ideas on how they would like to see the systems arranged or what information they would like to see about each system – please let us know!

Thanks, and Enjoy!

P.S. Oh, so it looks like Sonic Flare also mentioned selling complete systems this week as well. This meme must be getting around. Good.

… over in somebody ELSE’S system.

Repeat after me:

There is no perfect speaker.

There is no perfect amplifier.

There is no perfect…

It is the components that one Hasn’t heard that are the most incidious at making us doubters, making us wonder if THEY perhaps are the *** U-L-T-I-M-A-T-E *** COMPONENT.

Some of the Jones’ components are good, most are just OK, just like all components once you actually get to hear them for yourself.

It is the one’s we haven’t heard, where we wonder “maybeTHAT box has EVERYTHING… sophistication AND magic AND impressiveness!”, that are the most insidious, making us doubt everything we have learned up until now.

Truth: There are very, very few components that really ARE significantly greener than the rest. Most are just… different. Hey, at least half are actually worse than average :-).

However, it is the actual hearing one of these 8th wonders of the world that REALLY gets us hooked, dooms us to keep looking, always looking, across the street to see if the grass really IS greener over there.

It is our job here, our responsibility, tough life that we have, to scout around the 1000s of speakers, 1000s of amps, and cables and cd players, and preamps and powercords and determine which are truly special and which are just …nice.

Unlike most dealers we actually do not care if they ‘sell well’ – if they are really great sounding we will make the effort ourselves to help build their brand and get the word out there.

Unlike most reviewers we do not have to find a great component each and every month.

Unlike most reviewers (and most dealers who seem to rely more on the big bamboozle – yes, I just had to put bamboozle in somewhere; bamboozle is just too fun of a word to leave out of any good Blog for too awfully long 🙂 ) we actually care about how the components really sound because we play them here for very picky people who will spend some of their hard-earned to take what they are hearing home with them if they really like what they hear (and can afford what they hear).

We take this responsibility to heart – some components are really pretty good so there is no real need to replace them with the hot new brand X, the grass often really isn’t greener (it just the low angle you are looking at it from that makes it look greener 🙂 ) – save a few bucks.

OK, three smiley faces is all I allocate myself for each post (not really, but I bet you wish it were true) so I had better be…

…outa here.