Revealing Sound Spoils Enjoyment?
What's good hi-fi all about? If you just said 'music', take a brownie point and stop looking so smug - all you've done is grasped a point so many seem to miss. For while it's always possible to squeeze more performance from a system, and to reveal ever finer nuances in a recording, there comes a stage when the extra information stops contributing to what's being performed, and starts distracting from it.
In an ideal world, with perfect recordings, hi-fi equipment could keep getting better and the sense of wonder at what can be heard would grow ever greater. But the world isn't perfect, and the more low-level information a system reveals (and that's low in intensity, not frequency), the greater the potential for distracting background sounds to be picked up and relayed in all their glory.
Go to a concert, and the accidental 'click' as the conductor's baton clips a music-stand, the creak of a chair, a page being turned or a stifled cough would go unnoticed: close-mike things and reveal the foible in glorious repeatable high-resolution stereo, and every time the noise approaches you'll be anticipating it with dread. It can ruin an otherwise great recording.
A decade or two back, as the quality of systems increased, trainspotting became popular: listening to recordings made in certain London venues, you could hear tube trains rumbling past, faintly enough to be just irritating.
Listen to the radio on a high-quality tuner you'll be amazed how much extraneous noise is picked up and relayed, from script pages being turned to that famous BBC phantom driller. It's fun for all of five minutes, then gets very annoying indeed.
So can you have a system that's too good? It seems so, but we're not here to criticise the advances hardware manufacturers are making, nor the quest for ever greater resolution. After all, the more a system reveals, the better it can convey what's been recorded.
However, the continuing increase in hardware quality does put as many pressures on recording engineers as it increases opportunities.
And you ain't seen nothing yet: with the arrival of new CD technology, be it Super Audio CD or DVD-Audio, the dynamic range on offer is going to increase dramatically. The result is that, assuming your listening room is quiet enough not to lose information in the mush of everyday ambient noise (and few will be) even more extraneous stuff is likely to creep into the average recording.
Just as in the first days of talking pictures, when studios had to learn how to muffle cameras and make huge barns soundproof, the new super-CDs are going to need a radical rethink on the part of the recording industry if they're not to be accompanied by the hum of 'silent' conditioning, the whine of distant aeroplanes and unexpected truck horns from the street outside.
Or then again, maybe there is something to be said for a system that covers a multitude of sins...
