On the Definition of Hi-Fi Terminology — Twitter Log 6

Cleopatra’s Daydream ‏@cleopatrasdream 15 September
Whenever I hear the word “high-speed” in a Hi-Fi context, it’s almost always because the response of the highs, mids, and lows isn’t aligned. When everything lines up properly, it actually becomes more relaxed, not faster.

Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream 15 September
When I’m listening to live music, the word “high-speed” never even crosses my mind.

Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream 15 September
If something sounds vivid and immediate, it’s probably not live. Well, that goes without saying really…

Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream 15 September
And so my concern is how to make a sound that doesn’t call any of those words to mind — a sound where your attention is drawn to the music itself, which is what matters.

Cleopatra’s Daydream @cleopatrasdream 15 September
After years with Hi-Fi, there’s also the misfortune of having half-developed audiophile sensibilities that get in the way and stop you concentrating on the music. With live PA at a venue — rough and uniform as it is — that roughness can be pushed to the back of your awareness.

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
I’m genuinely surprised at how many people seem to be seriously puzzled by audio terminology — especially adjectives whose vagueness is built in and shared by convention. These terms are only ever describing a direction, so you really mustn’t treat them as if they were strict, absolute definitions. The moment your field of vision narrows, you’ve lost. Audio terminology is poetry, pure and simple. To put it in terms my fellow music nerds might understand…

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
As for definitions of words — I think as long as you have a general sense of the direction, the rest can be left to each person’s own feel for balance. Words are inherently fluid things, and it’s more enjoyable that way. It may well be that unnecessary conflict, friction, and breakdowns arise precisely when people try to be needlessly precise about defining things that have no clear outline to begin with.

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
As for what “Hi-Fi” originally meant in language — as you can tell from the title of a certain British audio magazine, I suspect it means something like “What on earth is Hi-Fi?” (British editorial translation: how should I know — buy the magazine and find out!). It’s now a word that refers to the whole enterprise of audio as a hobby pursued for sound quality, and I think the original meaning of the source words — High Fidelity, as in reproducing with ever greater faithfulness — has strictly speaking been lost for a very long time. The abbreviated symbol “Hi-Fi” itself sweeps up the entire orientation of pure audio as against general consumer audio. The trick is that it means “sounds like it might be good” rather than “is good”.

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
Misunderstandings about meaning arise, I think, precisely because people approach things with the assumption that a word should be understood in an unnecessarily narrow sense. If instead you take things in as a total image, accepting that a certain degree of variation is perfectly natural depending on individual experience, then even a vague, broad generalisation isn’t much of a problem — and you won’t find yourself agonising over failures of communication nearly as much.

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
“High fidelity reproduction” as the original meaning of Hi-Fi, and “Hi-Fi audio” as a category — I don’t think these two point in entirely different directions. Hi-Fi includes the narrow sense of high fidelity, but in the broader sense it refers to audio as a whole. There is no contradiction in this. From the enthusiast’s perspective they may seem quite different, but if you step back and look from the outside, from the general public’s point of view, they both ultimately fall within the same vector. The term was coined as a relative contrast to general consumer audio, and I think it emerged because the narrow sense of “fidelity” in the original was too limited to express what was meant externally. If the narrow-sense reading were sufficient, there would have been no need to coin the term “Hi-Fi” with such deliberate emphasis in the first place.

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
Audio magazine-style writing — or rather, audio poetry-style writing — still makes me think “what is this” rather often. I can say it now, but back in my chuunibyou days I actually sent a postcard of complaint to one audio magazine, saying I had no idea what they were on about…

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
Audio terminology tends to put people off, generally in one of three ways: (1) they’re a beginner; (2) they can’t follow abstract expression; or (3) they’re especially sensitive to language. I’ve accumulated enough experience to use these terms without too much stress, but it’s perfectly natural for an unfamiliar beginner to find them stressful — as I once did. Separately from that, there are occasionally people who simply lack the reading comprehension for metaphor and descriptive expression and can barely form any image at all — in those cases there’s not much to be done. And then at the opposite extreme, there are people who are so acutely sensitive to the feel of language that they find it unsettling — people who want to handle words more carefully and precisely, and who end up taking against the whole thing for that reason.

pastel_piano @pastel_piano 16 September
Metaphors and adjectives are inherently words with blurred edges — every reader will conjure a slightly different image. It’s the ambiguity that language carries, the part that can’t be resolved by digital means or mathematics. Descriptive expressions that put sensation into words will be misread to some degree or other by whoever receives them, and there is no adjective in existence that is misread by no one.

So why use such ambiguous, misunderstanding-prone expressions in audio equipment reviews at all? I think it’s because audio is not a machine for merely reproducing “sound” — it is a means of reproducing “music”. Music itself has blurred edges, and every listener forms a different image. You can share it emotionally and sensibly to a degree, but there is almost no quantitative definition or sharp outline to be found there.

The proliferation of abstract and sensory metaphorical expressions in audio terminology is, I believe, the inevitable result of the crossover between putting music into language and putting audio into language.