Last May, during a visit to High End Munich, I was ushered into an exhibitor’s room with much ceremony. Other showgoers had been shooed out so that I, a reviewer at an important magazine, could listen to the hi-fi undisturbed. The room featured obelisk-shaped “statement” speakers, monoblocks with enough tubes to light a cafeteria, and a wedding cake–sized turntable, all connected with python-thick cables. All of it cost as much as a starter house in coastal Connecticut.
The room’s proprietor asked me to choose from a small stack of LPs. I went for Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else, a wonderful Miles Davis record in all but name. I know it as well as any other piece of recorded music. When the system began to play, it was doing all the audiophile things expected of an expensive hi-fi. But while I recognized the notes, I struggled to recognize the music. Something was clearly, obviously amiss. The rhythmic emphases and stresses that convey music’s meaning and emotion were landing in the wrong places. If you had told me that each musician was playing by himself in a soundproof booth without headphones, I might have believed you. The short-term effect of this was confusion; the longer-term effect was boredom. “Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it!” the proprietor announced. He might have actually winked at me.
I wish I could tell you this experience was unusual. In fact, it happens to be entirely, depressingly common, and not only under audio-show conditions. Of course, anyone who’s struggled to install a system in an unfamiliar room knows that it takes real knowhow and skill to assemble components that sound great together and position them effectively. But all things being equal, these experiences suggest that more goes into a musically satisfying component than the usual sonic superlatives: soundstages as wide as an Iowa cornfield, transients sharp enough to shave with, colonoscopic levels of
