I’ve looked at hifi from both sides now / From bad and best and still somehow / It’s hifi’s illusions I recall / I really don’t know hifi at all.
The Barn’s B-Side is in full swing, having morphed from storage area, to reading room, to listening room over the course of 9 years, give or take. It seems like only yesterday that we moved into our current home, the one with the Barn, but I’m bad with time.
I started writing about hifi in March of 2005 for 6moons, then as Editor of AudioStream in September of 2011, and as Twittering Machines in July of 2018. I have no idea how many reviews I’ve written and have no interest in a tally. With a little time and effort, and with the help of archive.org for AudioStream, all of my work is available anywhere where the internet is. 18 years in total, about 11 full time.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, apprenticeship programs typically take 1-6 years to complete so if there was one for hifi reviewers, I’d have completed mine some time ago. But there isn’t an apprenticeship program for hifi reviewers and other than association and/or time spent, there are no formal qualifications to become, or to be, a hifi reviewer.
My review writing process begins in my head, well before I type a single word, as a thought typically in the form of a theme for the review to be written that touches on some ideally important aspect of the thing being reviewed. Recently this process led me to think and note the phrase—An honest apprentice. That’s it.
And here I sit, thinking that this phrase best describes my job as a hifi reviewer—an honest apprentice—because new gear can teach us things we didn’t already know if we just give it time and an open mind with which to listen. At least that’s my thinking and the way I approach every review.
The Barn’s sides, two similar but different listening areas, bring this thinking into sharp focus where two different systems fill their respective spaces with similar but different sounds from the same music. Is one right making the other wrong? Not in my experience. Is one better making the other worse? Not in my experience. Besides, these considerations are more than beside the point of hifi, at least here in the Barn and in my life, because the only job a hifi has to do is make us want to listen to music more, ideally leading to the endless quenchless thirst for the new.
Let’s redefine high fidelity as being faithful to the passion for and discovery of music. This means that the best hi-fi is the one that perpetually fans the flame of this passion.
I wrote that in October 2010 for the “As We See It” feature in Stereophile so it appears I haven’t really learned much after all except perhaps the realization that the most important thing a hifi can teach us has nothing to do with hifi and everything to do with music.