On the Relationship Between Money Spent on Hi-Fi and Level of Satisfaction

【Hi-Fi Culture, Refinement, and Nouveau Riche Taste】
Investment vs. Satisfaction｜High-End Part 1｜High-End Part 2｜Nouveau Riche Taste

I was lurking on the Phile-web community when I came across a post making the argument that “the amount you invest in audio is proportional to your satisfaction with the sound,” and I found myself reading it with considerable interest. It’s not something I had given much thought to before, but I suppose there really are quite a lot of people among high-end and luxury Hi-Fi users for whom “investment = satisfaction” is simply how it works?

In my own case — living up fully to my reputation as a born penny-pincher — satisfaction actually decreases as the investment goes up, which puts me in complete opposition to the view expressed in that post. If anything, the more the system budget swells, the more I feel as though I’ve somehow lost. Why does satisfaction go down in proportion to the money spent? In my case, it’s because I find my sense of identity not in spending money, but in being able to say: “I built a system that sounds like this — for this little?” …Perhaps that means my pride is of the wrong sort. I’m not especially drawn to the sense of status that apparently comes with owning expensive, famous-brand Hi-Fi equipment — I find it impressive, certainly, but it feels entirely like someone else’s world.

On top of that, I am by nature someone who dislikes having the same things as everyone else, so I feel more genuinely satisfied owning minor, obscure products that few other people have and that can’t simply be bought with money. The feeling of reassurance that comes from conforming to the crowd — that particular instinct is something I lack entirely; if anything, I want to be as eccentric and different a hobbyist as I possibly can.

On the question of investment, as I have long maintained on this site with its focus on budget Hi-Fi from entry-level to mid-range, cost-performance is the priority. It stands to reason, in a sense, that spending a great deal of money will yield impressive sound. But if you can match — or even surpass — high-end audio with a fraction of the outlay, isn’t that the more impressive achievement?

In the first place, the world of pure Hi-Fi is full of exceptions when it comes to sound quality and price, and in reality the two do not correlate in any neat or simple way. There are occasions when I encounter a truly magnificent-sounding piece of high-end equipment and feel genuine awe — but equally, there is no shortage of high-end systems costing several million yen in total, or in some cases over ten million, that produce sounds of a baffling and inexplicable awfulness. In fact, the dispiriting cases are if anything more common. As I have touched on in my Goldmund entries, the price tags on high-end products are not necessarily a reflection of development and manufacturing costs, or of sound quality. Conversely, a limited budget does not automatically mean poor sound — taking into account the combination of components, setup and placement, and the use of various accessories, I believe that Hi-Fi is a hobby where the results come not simply from money spent, but from an intuitive sense for reproduced sound, accumulated experience through trial and error, and a sensitivity and insight into music itself, all working together.

Beyond the question of achieving excellent cost-value — paying less relative to the sound quality and musical expressiveness you get — there are several other points that matter even more to me when choosing a Hi-Fi system, and I would like to set out a few of those here as well, alongside the matter of price.

Attractive Design and Build Quality

Audio equipment is furniture that lives in a room, so if there is something overly machine-like or dreary in its design, I personally don’t feel good about it, however well it sounds. My own taste runs to things Western and old-world, with an interior kept consistently in a traditional British style, so designs that sit ill with that are naturally ruled out from the start. That is part of the reason why this site focuses mainly on European equipment, with a particular leaning towards British and French products. I do have a fondness for the avant-garde modernism of Scandinavian design as well, but anything too forward-looking tends to be difficult to place in my home outside of the PC audio corner.

When I say “stylish audio,” what I have in mind is not high-end luxury or the kind of sleekness that announces itself — it’s more a design that carries a feeling of age and tradition, something that would look at home tucked into a corner of a study lined with foreign books, CDs, and records; something a little weathered and worn. I find myself charmed by the clunky mechanical clunk of a European CD player’s tray sliding out, or by an anachronistic and slightly peculiar indicator display. And a flimsy, lightweight chassis — or opening the lid to find the interior almost entirely empty — has its own appeal, in its own way.

That said, within all this cheapness there must be some hint of cultural refinement — that is essential. The kind of cheapness that wafts from old domestic mini-systems, all surface gloss and no substance, simply won’t do; and it is also slightly different from the brusque, no-nonsense aesthetic of those products aimed squarely at the technically-minded enthusiast. There is a world of difference between a handmade quality that insists on audio performance while showing no aesthetic sensibility, and the kind of inexpensive feel that carries the scent of cultural tradition. After all, sound quality exists in service of music. Music is aesthetics. The design of Hi-Fi equipment — where small and mid-sized independent manufacturers are the norm — naturally reflects the maker’s own aesthetic relationship with music. As a result, I personally believe there is a deep, if invisible, correlation between the visual design of a piece of equipment or a loudspeaker and the aesthetic sensibility behind its sound.

A Simple System and Simple Cabling

By nature, I prefer an all-in-one Hi-Fi system of the kind exemplified by the Aura Note. As things stand, the only all-in-one system I actually own is the Victor EX-A5. The separate-component structure of pure Hi-Fi — where players and amplifiers are split into individual units and a whole collection of cables becomes necessary — is, when you think about it honestly, a mechanophile’s indulgence that is roundabout and quite unnecessary for the purpose of simply enjoying music. I willingly engage in all that trial and error myself, and yet somewhere I do feel that, at a fundamental level, it is rather absurd. That said, from a commercial and marketing standpoint the fragmentation of products makes sense; and one suspects that multiplying the hobby’s variables, complications, and potential pitfalls — drawing the enthusiast ever deeper into the mire and driving a constant demand for new equipment and accessories — requires, almost inevitably, ever more separate boxes and ever more separates.

When I think about just how far removed it is from the essence of music-listening — lining up a rack of equipment, draping cables in coils all around the place and displaying them proudly — it gives me a headache. But this hobby called Hi-Fi is something whose identity, for enthusiasts the world over, involves carrying exactly these kinds of self-contradictions and internal conflicts while knowingly broadcasting crackpot theories with a clear conscience. So please, handle that side of things with a certain adult equanimity, enjoy it for what it is, and don’t go bullying anyone too mercilessly about it…

With simplicity of configuration in mind, I have until now held firmly to stereo (L/R 2-channel) pure Hi-Fi, and have steered away from multi-box amplifier arrangements — integrated moving to separates — and surround systems centred on multi-channel AV amplifiers. However, as smartphones and DAPs, network audio, and digital music distribution have spread, and now that I myself have begun dipping my toes into PC audio, it looks as though a more fragmented and separates-heavy configuration on the digital source side — beyond the traditional speakers ⇒ integrated/digital amplifier ⇒ DAC ⇒ CD transport chain — is going to be unavoidable going forward…

When it comes to audio cables of all kinds, however, my basic policy is to keep them as short as possible. Overseas, RCA interconnects and digital cables in 50 cm or 6 ft lengths are sold as a matter of course, yet cables made in Japan or imported into Japan are fixed at an absurd minimum of 1 metre — why on earth is that? From a technical standpoint too, it is preferable to keep signal paths as short as physically practical; so this oddly penny-pinching attitude of “bigger covers smaller, longer covers shorter” really ought to be abandoned in the world of pure Hi-Fi. In a compact, miniature-garden-style setup, speaker cables of around 60–75 cm per side are generally more than enough, so I would love to see cut-to-length cables sold in 10 cm increments rather than by the metre. Though I am well aware that insisting on buying speaker cables in 120 cm lengths is itself probably the most penny-pinching thing about me…

The same applies to internal circuitry. Rather than a product crammed with components in a show of parts-count excess, I prefer the kind of simple, beautiful circuit you often find in European products — a minimal number of carefully considered parts, arranged cleanly in a fully discrete left/right configuration. Sparse interiors are perfectly fine by me. And needless to say, a circuit that looks a mess from tangled internal wiring is entirely out of the question. I write all this while being, I should confess, essentially a layman who barely understands a circuit diagram — but when more and more components are interposed in the signal path, I feel as though the expressive character and spiritual detail inherent in the music as recorded is being stripped away, leaving me with the sensation of eating processed food that has been heavily seasoned and artificially coloured.

A Compact System

What on earth does one do with Hi-Fi equipment the size of a tank? ←(Am I picking a fight with the owners?) Japanese people live in rabbit hutches, in a miniature world of miniature roads and miniature towns, and yet for some reason are inexplicably drawn to enormous pieces of Hi-Fi equipment and people-carriers or SUVs they barely use in daily life. Is this some form of overcompensation? Several pieces of Hi-Fi equipment each occupying 50 cm on a side in a cramped living space must surely feel oppressive and in the way — though of course it’s none of my business, and if the owner doesn’t find it bothersome then that’s perfectly fine. What the family thinks, I wouldn’t know. Of course, none of this is relevant to those who live in detached houses and can listen at full volume, or to those with large homes and generous disposable incomes, so please don’t take it personally.

That said, if you really think through what the act of listening to music fundamentally requires, the ideal ought to be sound coming from as wide and open a space as possible, with nothing to obstruct it on any side. Or rather, that is my ideal. In that case, and given the constraints of living space, Hi-Fi equipment is most rational when it is as small as possible. Though when someone says “I’ve put all my music on an HDD so space is no object,” I feel that is lacking something in terms of cultural richness; and my conservative instincts, honed over many years as a CD collector from which there is no turning back, quietly seethe with an inner displeasure, however politely I might smile.

If we think of the listening environment not in terms of the equipment itself but as a space for experiencing reproduced music, then surely the most natural and musical approach is a small Hi-Fi system that is visually unobtrusive — beautiful even, when it catches the eye — paired with small loudspeakers that are lovely as furniture and approximate a point source acoustically, reproducing sound in such a way that you lose all sense of where the speakers or the equipment are, and the room itself seems to become the soundstage, filling like a concert hall. (Note: this is primarily a discussion of classical music reproduction, where live performance is the reference.) To be honest, I have always felt instinctively that the most agreeable sound is music flowing from small speakers suspended in the upper corners of a room, filling the space with reflections that seem to come from nowhere in particular — I’ve known that for a hundred years, you might say, but admitting it out loud would feel like a defeat for anyone who considers themselves a serious pure Hi-Fi enthusiast…

Well then — in terms of direction, the values that underpin this blog and the miniature-garden pure Hi-Fi world I have been building here are roughly as I have described. In practice, there are individual cases where I have splashed out on a high-end brand product, or ended up with a more complex system configuration than intended, or a cable that isn’t quite the shortest it could be, or a box that is frankly not much to look at — the reality does not always match the ideals set out above. But,

The true purpose of Hi-Fi equipment — above and beyond any question of what form it takes — ought always to be the listening to music.

Bringing the sound of your equipment closer to the ideal musical image you carry in your head involves all manner of detours and dead ends along the way, and purchases and setups often don’t go as planned — but that is all part of the pleasure of the hobby. My hope is that everyone takes their time, unhurried and relaxed, enjoying the world of Hi-Fi across the years.

【Hi-Fi Culture, Refinement, and Nouveau Riche Taste】
Investment vs. Satisfaction｜High-End Part 1｜High-End Part 2｜Nouveau Riche Taste