4 ms·

Even then, $1000 is very unlikely to be a meaningful investment. The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when

Even then, $1000 is very unlikely to be a meaningful investment. The hard upper limit is the equipment the mastering engineer used to listen to the track when mastering it. Even if your equipment can reproduce more detail, that's likely unwanted detail. Something you'll frequently notice when listening to youtube shorts on a big home theater setup – a lot of wind noise below 80Hz which the author couldn’t notice, but which is deafening. The same, though more subtle, happens when listening to professionally mastered audio with an excessive audiophile setup.

foolwhofollows 4y ago
That's definitely true! This, I think, is the major misunderstanding about HiFi - high fidelity means highly faithful, i.e. the equipment is designed to create a faithful reproduction, and not to needlessly embellish. If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment. Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication. However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters. See also: https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasting-out-of-busted-iphone-speakers-exactly-how-it-was-meant-to-be-played/ https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasti...

foolwhofollows 4y ago

That's definitely true! This, I think, is the major misunderstanding about HiFi - high fidelity means highly faithful, i.e. the equipment is designed to create a faithful reproduction, and not to needlessly embellish. If the track you are listening to was recorded in some teenager's bedroom on a crappy cassette deck, then it should sound as such. This is equally as important as being able to pick out the detail on a track that has been produced with all the latest state of the art equipment. Music is fundamentally about communication of emotion that transcends language and the purpose of a good HiFi is to facilitate that communication. However, when it comes to consuming things like video content, particularly that made for youtube, tiktok, etc. then it is probably unfaithful to even attempt to listen to it on a high-end system, just as you say. It's like eating MacDonald's in a michelin starred restaurant or scranning gourmee steak from a takeaway container while drunk on a street corner at three in the morning: context matters. See also: https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasting-out-of-busted-iphone-speakers-exactly-how-it-was-meant-to-be-played/ https://hard-drive.net/hd/entertainment/100-gecs-song-blasti...