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" I’m obessesed with Hi-Fi. When you sit down and play one of your favourites it gets addictive. "
Monday 9 October 2006
By Jack Lawson (Exclusive)
Obessesed with Hi-Fi
There’s a joke about obsession which runs as follows...
A teacher asked her class to write an essay of 200 words on elephants. The French pupil wrote on the love life of elephants; the American about the breeding of bigger and better elephants; the Jewish pupil wrote about elephants and the future of Israel.
I’m obessesed with Hi-Fi. When you sit down and play one of your favourites it gets addictive. Your rules of economic sanity are suspended when it comes to buying the next upgrade. But you also try to make a careful choice; and you try to save money.
This is where and why the world-wide-web has transformed the Hi-Fi industry over the last decade. Is it for better or worse? Both and neither! As an old fogey, I still welcome change and just as the music industry must adapt or die, so the Hi-Fi industry must do the same.
Computers are no more than a tool and a technology. Don’t throw our common sense and sanity: everything else stays the same. Especially human values. So let’s consider the basic ones: greed and dishonesty. They thrive on the anonymity and opportunity of the world wide web, and part of their true evil is that they threaten not only people but the precious potential of the www itself. In Hi-Fi, fraud is not restricted to the obvious cons, but to cunning manipulation by the marketing people. Buyers beware. Marketing people know how to manipulate favourable comments, erase and remove unfavourable comments and insert urban myths. I am too old fogey to know how it worked but I strongly suspect that a competitor attacked one of my brands by setting up misleading impressions of people dumping it at low prices after disappointment; there was a trail of forum negativity and stories of grey-importing it from Asia at half the UK price.
Even more pernicious way of dehumanising something as inspiring as Hi-Fi can and must be is to reduce it to what I still term the Which? system of points. It is the What Hi-Fi? reductionism: just two steps beyond how many watts per pound. Frankly, I don’t even believe that this method can assess a dishwasher (and I’ve owned a few). The best was slim, silent, fast and easy to use. It lasted for 14 years. Got low ratings!
The internet has turned most Hi-Fi dealers into box brokers, and many manufacturers have followed a trend they see as inevitable. High quality prototype models are submitted for review (online or magazine) and production models are made with cheaper components to sell for discounted prices.
Hi-Fi sometimes looks as if it is becoming a lost art. As digitisation lowers resolution and the glass ceiling squeezes the music into the equivalent of a Big Mac (by which I mean a very acceptable appetite quosher but hardly an example of delicious haute cuisine). While the marketing boys have succeeded in having the word digital accepted as good, audiophiles know better. If you want quality, you pays for it, and you find a consulting dealer rather than a box broker.
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Audio Salon, Audio, Hi-Fi, Specialist, Consultant, Two Channel, Scotland, Jack Lawson,
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