"Nousaine" wrote in message
news:LelLc.150433$XM6.103359@attbi_s53...
"Harry Lavo" wrote:

"Michael McKelvy" wrote in message
...
"Harry Lavo" wrote in message

I said:
The hobby is still called high-fi and that has a meaning. Anything
that
gets us closer to the intent of the artist by removing distortion,
noise,
compression, or whatever might be hiding the choices made by the
artist
and
the engineer is a benefit. I don't really care about other
preferences,
they are yours and you're welcome to them, but if they include
things
like
flawed playback devices, they are LOWER-fi.


Unfortunately, the hobby hasn't been called "high-fi" in many
years...high-end audio has replaced that terminology.

That should make you think. Why was the term Hi-Fi abandoned?

Because it was over-ridden by high-end a marketing and sales term that had
nothing to do with audio accuracy.

Could it be that it the real advancements have been done?

That's exactly the right answer.

No, I think the phrase "high-end" was coined by Harry Pearson in the
early
days of TAS, to define companies that were primarily listening-oriented
vs.
measurement-oriented, because everything was called "hi-fi" in those
days,
including stuff that measured well but sounded like dreck...mostly mid-fi
stuff that was positioned as "hi-fi".

So where are the controlled listening tests that shows anything sounded
like
"dreck?" Where are the controlled listening tests that show that that
"high-end" equipmnet sounds better than "dreck"?

Harry, from the beginning, made a
point of noting that he was talking about where (how high, or how
exalted)
they set their company's "mission", not their price.

Oh really: so how come there have been no bias-controlled listening tests
conducted or published? Was it NOT true that you are suggesting that
measurements didn't convey an accurate picture of an audio components true
acoustical performance? So why weren't there any confirming
bias-controlled
listening tests to show that this was true? A 'screen' would seem to have
been
an obvious closer.

So a lot of not very
expensive gear was reviewed as well as some very expensive stuff. For
example, NAD was considered high end. Yamaha was not. And that
distinction
was deserved based on the sound of the day.

There was nothing based on the "sound" of the day because there were no
bias-controlled listening tests employed confirming that the evaluations
were
confined to acoustical import.

Given the time of the "day" I wonder why not. It would seem to have been
so
easy.


Because, frankly, in the "day" under discussion the sound differences even
among amplifiers were as different as often the sound is today among
speakers. Easily heard once you removed the propaganda bias. The purpose
of the magazines was to say...."forget measurements and measurement hype for
a moment, and just listen. Does it sound remotely like live music? Is it
closer or further from that goal than the stuff you had five years ago? Ten
years ago?" And those two magazines filled a real void. It was the
attempts to define a vocabulary to describe sound, and the finger placed
upon certain audio "sins", that perked the interest of enough engineers and
entrepreneurs to reverse the momentum of deteriorating sound and start it
back upwards to the high quality sound that is the rule today.