I always quite laugh when the Audio Morons ™, overwhelmed with zillion-dollars-worth audio installations and with primitive sound in their room, answer my questions: What you guys doing? Those people are under mistaking impression that they do High End Audio. In fact what they do is not what they believe they do and what they do it something that I call “Inverted High End” ™. The “Inverted High End” ™  is very common and very domination pattern in audio, not just dominating but practically the pattern that leaves no room for the real High End. The nature, the inner mechanisms, the harm of the IHE and how it should be different is something that I will be addressing in this thread.

The currently existing High End Audio consists of consumers and solution providers. The consumers are the consumers and the solution providers are manufactures, distributors, retailers and marketing people. The mechanism roughly works according to the rules that a manufacturer has an ability to offer a product that could be sold. From there, if the manufacturer embraces the little ballet that the distributors, retailers and marketing folks dance, then the manufacturer’s product become available for consumers consumption. Some manufacturers sell their products “direct”, bypassing the industry distribution chains, but it makes no difference as the consumers still harvest the results of the manufacturers efforts instead of addressing via audio methods the state of own audio frustrations. Some might think that consumers have “choice” among the hundreds of the manufactures and hundreds of manufacture’s different views on sound. Well, it is not so simple.

Let vive aside who most of the manufactures, what objectives they have and what justification and reasons they have to do what they do.  The deeper problem is that manufactures, as the providers of the solutions, address not the actual sonic nuisances but only generic and very limited objectives. They juts by nature of their operation could not afford to dive into the details. Pretend that you looking for a suite and your tailor just talk to you over a phone caring only about your height and asking you only about the color of your suite. Sounds ridicules? No more ridicule then audio people do in audio when they are “shopping for audio”. In realty the audio people go to a big market with hundreds of the common tailors and try to find a suite that would fit their body. Nothing wrong with it but it is not High End Audio but juts Audio, the regular consumer audio. I am been telling for years that using the regular consumer audio from regular very inexpensive consumer products it is possible to accomplish very-very high audio results, way higher then 99% of the results then Audio people are accomplishing today in this listening rooms. How can I explain to a person who paid $36.000 for his Mark Levinson, $25.000 for Krell, $15,000 for Burmester or $23.000 for his ASR Emitter that a proper model of $400 Denon or Techniques or Sony are able to perform the levels of magnitude more capable. It is not necessary that those Denons or Suzukis are better audio but because the Krells and Burmesters more made-up problems with Sound. So the generic demands lead to the generic solutions. It is not High End and there is not needs to apply the principles of the healthy High End snobbism to the very ordinary generic implementations. To do it is similar to trip to Woolworth’s and feeling that you look at the best tailor work possible for you custom body style. In fact this situation, when a consumer explicitly inherents the outcome of the industry audio defecation I call “Inverted High End” ™.

The “Inverted High End” ™ is dependency of consumer’s demands upon the availability of solutions. As the result the primitivism of the manufactures desire drive the consumers scope. Since most of the audio manufactures are drop offs from other industries, culturally handicapped or juts people who failed in other fields then we understand the depth of the swamp when the audiophiles are sinking. A solution how to become not subjected to the “Inverted High End”? Welcome to the club of the Real High End…

The Real High End is a situation when the desires of consumers drive manufacturers. I mean the level of the consumer’s audio development, the evolvement of the consumers reference points and the consumers views about the sound become the ONLY guiding principle in the consumer’s navigation within the market of availabilities. The mechanism is simple and almost absurd in the scale of the today audio world. A consumer use the proper pre-purchase assessment techniques:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/TreeItem.aspx?postID=2909 (and  DO follow the link within the post)

After this, when the requirements for the “next step” are formed and literally documented, then a consumer approaches a manufactures of his chose and imposes his requirements to the manufacture. Here is where a few phenomenally interesting moments takes place:

1) 95% of all manufactures go to dark and never show up anymore because they are disabled to make audio with predicable sonic characteristic.

2) The marketing superstructure of audio automatically get eliminated or very substantially suppressed, as there is no application market for their services.

3) Consumers get own responsibilities for sound in their listening rooms that serve a phenomenal educational tool.

4)  Audio industry begins to develop for a first time the REAL methods of sound manufacturing and sound assessments.

5) Manufactures, also for a first time, begin to respect and to value the interest of consumers.

The ridiculeness of the Anti Inverted High End approach is that there is nothing in Real High End that violates the manufactures interest, menace money. Sure the manufactures do not do the cookie-curter products anymore but I am not talking about the completely custom products but about manufactures running this core topologies and tune the design for “Sound” that a consumes asks.  Sure, the manufactures make less products but the also do not give up 50%-75% of their income to the “distribution nothingness”. I think by properly organizing the R&D techniques and production is it perfectly possible to make products “accommodative”. Definitely it will create a certain discomfort among the manufactures but “fuck” them if the consumers can get in return better audio, better sound and healthier relationship with “solution providers”. Also, do not forget that 95% of all manufactures return back to where then come from - change the power outlets in hotels – and whoever left among the Real High End manufactures are the people who can “handle it”…

Utopia? Hm, yeas and no. I can see here and there pop up individual manufactures who have courage to do what they believe and to stay behind what they do.  Those manufactures are so capable that they are not afraid to take on the tasks to deliver to a consumer not the solutions but satisfaction. They might be even more expansive but the money with their products-projects actually relates to the result. If the mutual consumer and manufacture results are something that comes from the consumer’s objective then my hat off to this collaboration.

So, the Real High End vs. Inverted High End. The Realty of the Sound vs. the Surrogate of Sound. Who owns who? Manufactures own the consumer via their marketing pimps or we, the consumers, own this entire damn industry? The fraudulent and ignorant manufactures along with zombienised and damn Morons-consumers or fertile and wiling manufactures along with free and demanding consumers?

Well, you decide…

Antonio J. wrote:

I agree with your thoughts. Current High End is to audio like Haute Couture is to fashion. You actually pay for something that a designer decided you may need (in fact he gives a damn if you need it or not always you buy it), and you take it as is, paying a high amount of money. Not the designer, nor the customer know if that thing is really worth that money regarding performance (sound for audio, wheather protection and good looks for clothes), and all you get is something others say is good, looks good and is above all very exclusive, but definitively is not worth its cost for the performance you get. The same way a "pret a porter" suit doesn't fit your body the same way a custom made suit or shirt would, a High End amplifier, speakers or DAC won't meet your objectives to have music sounding like music in your house. Modern High End Audio is just a high status product, you pay for a brand, supposed high quality materials and manufacturing, and also to support an industry which is flawed from its conception. In this same way, as a mid-market product in audio may fit your needs as well or even better as a high end product, a mid-priced suit at Woolwart can fit you better and keep better your body heat than an Armani suit. Are there any custom tailors in audio? Would Wilson produce for me something the size and price of the Sophias but without bass port, way higher sensivity and dead flat 8 ohm impedance to be driven with SET amps? I don't mean that would sound as I feel I need, but it would be a nice starting point hahaha.

If you list you opera broadcast on your table radio, have civilized reference popints and you have heard the idiocy that the audio propaganda have implanted in your then you naturally never will have desire for “faster bass”, “more air at highs” or “better micro-dynamics”. All this crap does not exist in real world and it explicitly comes to audio people along with primitivism or idiocy of the industry’s assholes who hijack audio from audio people.

The Real High End is not customization but the development of ABILITY of the audio users to profile their audio demands into structured and meaningful requirement. Also it is the existence of an audio industry infrastructure what able to embrace and render this requirement into targeted implantations.

I do not particularly blame the manufacturers that they are disables to make audio with predicable musical and sonic characteristics. They are impotent not because they are bad but because they are the hostages of the very same disease as the consumers are. However, I DO blame the consumers who inept, incompetent and drifty audio consumers who could not even ask common sense having questions about audio. Why do you thon I ordinary call the audio hoodlums the Audio-Morons ™?

Antonio J. wrote:

I think that high end was born as a marketing strategy in the US to fight the market invasion from Japan in the 60's

I think we are speaking about different things, you speak about real High End which should be best possible sound quality to serve a musical purpose, and I'm speaking about a High End industry which doesn't give a damn about musical performance, because it's all about selling you a difference. The status difference and irrelevant sound differences.
I meant High End as a whole audio conception with the marketing strategies and magazines we have now. At that time you're refering they started more to speak about High Fidelity than about High End, though I don't doubt those were the first High End tapes, maybe there wasn't still a High End industry in the same way it started to exist in the sixties, changing their focus more on exclusivity and high prices than in real better sound for a musical purpose. My impression is that historically High-Fidelity became a popular term in the 50's and with the advent of inexpensive japanese gear in the 60's which also met the DIN 45500 standards (so might be called HiFi), the audio industry in the US needed to develope a marketing strategy based upon the "even better" which became High End to be differentiated from average HiFi.
Nevertheless I think we agree that High End should be a different thing than it is :-)

rgrds,
A.

Interesting post, Dominick. However, my views are way more radical. I am not for discouraging – I am for a complete elimination. What I feel should be elimination is a superstructure that sets artificial and completely bogus hierarchy in audio. We rank tennis players but we do not rank artistic performances. We rank mutual founds but we do not rank paintings or musicians… I mean we rank the simple subjects that might be evaluated in simplistic one-dimension: score or yield. We can even rank pop-songs, however we don’t do it by artistic qualities but only by revenue that they generated. The audio industry invented a bogus concept that better audio has some other meaning then juts being “better’ audio. Interestingly that the industry never was able to define what would mean “better audio” and then the industry tosses in some linguistic surrogates that do not serve any other purpose then… to build a primitive “perceptional hierarchy”. The problem is that the audio users generally are not really audio-intelligent people and within an absent of any audio intelligence or sonic integrity those people sponge unfortunately absolutely anything. Do you know that most of audio manufacturers when the time comes (it happens when all pre-buttered customers “have bought” and now is the time for the next round to sell) design their audio not with sonic objective or with customer benefits objective but targeting the very specific pre-developed marketing gap? I spoke with one manufacturer (one of the most prominent whose product at the very top of the industry hierarchy) who told me that he dose not care how his products sound and do not even care what kind press he will be getting when he release his products. According to him the mechanism is so well-oiled, so corrupted and so idiotic (his word) that whatever he produces will be sold as soon he punch the necessary marketing buttons. So, the industry is not about the encouraging of discouraging customers but about implanting the replacement-awareness into the brains of the Morons-consumers and then stupidly and very non-elegantly milking that implanted awareness. Interestingly that any industry person who involved in this, even for a short time, get so infected and do degraded that the person very rapidly devaluates up to the point of absolute nothingness. Pay attention: any industry person who do this crap more then a year might be a perfectly balanced and rational human being but as soon as a subject touches the subject of his professional interest then his/her eyes flip upside down and the person begins to express so much idiocy that it is not even funny. I personally put all industry people out of prentices of my interest and I am for a complete elimination of those people. Who should be left: we - the consumers, our requirements and the people who are able to fulfill the requirements. All the rest is just a ballast that fucks up audio as a subject of interests.

Dominic wrote:

Tell me though, how is the high end's idea of better audio different from say the car industry's idea of the car you need?

The car industry promotes better cars that address customers’ needs. The high-end audio industry has no thing to do with customers’ needs but instead it develop own simulated needs and then make customers and manufactures at chaise those bogus needs. Once Socrates return from his local market and told: “Now I’ve learned that there are many things in this world that I have absolutely no need”. I would not enumerate all faulty needs that the high-end audio industry created but I declare the entire industry as the a big unnecessary thing.

Well, to be a little more practical (admittedly utopiacly practical) I think that a overly sensitive, almost anal-retentive, prosecution of the industry idiots-writers is something the might kill that superfluous dirt. You remember when in 1984 Bose Corporation sued Consumer Reports Magazine for publishing a review in which a reviewer blamed Bose that images from Bose speaker "tended to wander around room". There was a bunch of other foolishness in there and Bose took the Consumer Reports to the Court. Eventuality they were running all the way up to Federal Supreme Court. I think it was absolutely brilliant move for audio manufacturer. Since then any industry bubble-pusher afraid to touch Bose products with their dirty hands.  So what?  Bose runs it’s own marketing; do not give a damn about the entire industry and very much flourishes as company… while the Stereophile magazine sells itself for $9 per year. I think it is exactly how it should be. The reviewing superstructure, as an independent marketing force, should be hit by overvaluing amount of lawsuits from manufactures when they publish BS and from another side they should be hit by overvaluing amount of lawsuits from consumers and consumers unions when whey spread their fraud and deceptions. It would make those idiots to shut up for good and in the absent of the reviewing noise that the industry injects into audio the real consumer awareness will start developing.

The guys like J.G. Holt brought to the wide public the things, from which “all the crap begun”. Holt was the first who came up in mass-publication with a concept of looking at the music through the dirty window where his new term “transparency” is clearness of that dirty window. I do not think that Holt meant bad but misuse of that and many other allegories lead to the following outcome:

1) Audio Industry instead of producing music imitating machines got converted into the Industry that produces nothing else but the widow polishing liquids

2) By focusing their eyes on the depth of focus where the window is located the industry completely lost association between the “transparency of the window” and the “transparency of the musical image through the window”

That is why I feel that the birth of the official, sponsored and lobbied High-End was actually the beginning of the High-End’s ending. Now, return back to the first post in this thread and read it again…

I think all that Holt-invented language is bogusness. That language exists only in order to manage mechanism of audio distribution/marketing and for nothing else. Sure, those language-armed guys form the Industry see themselves in an epicenter of administration of audio needs but it is not where I see them. I see them as opportunistic sons of the bitches who injected own absolutely unnecessary presents into audio. Read my initial post in this thread and tell me in witch ass all those marketing whores should be stuck if the things in audio were not according to the “Inverted High End” rule? Why do we need any “language” in audio if musical culture has a perfectly developed, stratified musical language? In fact, the distortions of the musical language, while the language is going through audio, is for years, one of my tools to assess playback systems.  Well, as Clark uses to say a few years back “audio became a hobby about literature”…

BTW, Do you know a differents between parks planning in UK and US? Americans recruit an architect who analyze traffic, make the layouts for the roads across the park. Brits seed the whole park with grass and then after a year observes where people were walking and made walkways on the grass, and then, they convert the walkways into the roads….

Anyhow, I do sensually feel that if tomorrow all that industry superfluousness that uses that “invented audio language” as their “processional qualification” would due out from kind of “Syndrome of Sharp Reviewing Moronity” then audio as awareness would only gain from it. As far as I concern they all are dead to me anyway….

So what other than one’s own sense of what’s realistic makes for “good” reproduction?  For instance, I have found to my surprise that few people seem to notice or care about correct pitch, timbre, weight and scale, or colorations, as long as the sound is “clear”, with lots of details, and/or it fills the room in a certain way.  Others seem to care mostly about “dynamics”, “imaging”, etc., again, to the point where they seem to need only the one facet to suggest to them the entire diamond.

Yet, just to press this point, I have noticed that very often the person who says he cares so extremely about one or another “part” of music never actually gets that one part right, either.  In fact, this “part” that he finds so important is too often rendered in the most aberrated and ridiculous manner, and winds up being the worst thing about his system, just like the unbearable car stereo nut who cranks up the bass until everything around him shakes in stunned disbelief.

But I think that some reviewers just believe it is not possible to re-create music with hi-fi in a realistic fashion, and of these there are some who seem resigned to making the most of what they assume is a stuck/bad situation.  Art Dudley, for instance, always struck me this way.  If I am wrong about this, then I can in no way account for the sound he favored for so many years, all the unnatural colorations and constrained presentations, just for the PRAT he so prized that he disparaged systems and gear he found to lack "it".

I can say I had become resigned to try to “get the most” from my records, abandoning the earlier dream of “accuracy”.

But now I have tried the ML2s, and I am being forced once again to re-think my ideas about hi-fi and what can be done with it.

If the "gunshot" switch-on relay pulse from one amp doesn’t blow up my speakers, I will take the opportunity to listen anew to listen to some great music and ponder the unique characteristics of this totally different “amplifier”, which is not without flaws, as some have suggested, but which does seem to succeed in getting my attention to a whole different level of (sound and) music appreciation.

And when the time comes to try to share my experiences, I will take a breath and do the best I can.  I always hope for that most significant form of language, the dialogue.

Paul S wrote:

So what other than one’s own sense of what’s realistic makes for “good” reproduction?  For instance, I have found to my surprise that few people seem to notice or care about correct pitch, timbre, weight and scale, or colorations, as long as the sound is “clear”, with lots of details, and/or it fills the room in a certain way.  Others seem to care mostly about “dynamics”, “imaging”, etc., again, to the point where they seem to need only the one facet to suggest to them the entire diamond. Yet, just to press this point, I have noticed that very often the person who says he cares so extremely about one or another “part” of music never actually gets that one part right, either.  In fact, this “part” that he finds so important is too often rendered in the most aberrated and ridiculous manner, and winds up being the worst thing about his system, just like the unbearable car stereo nut who cranks up the bass until everything around him shakes in stunned disbelief. But I think that some reviewers just believe it is not possible to re-create music with hi-fi in a realistic fashion, and of these there are some who seem resigned to making the most of what they assume is a stuck/bad situation.  Art Dudley, for instance, always struck me this way.  If I am wrong about this, then I can in no way account for the sound he favored for so many years, all the unnatural colorations and constrained presentations, just for the PRAT he so prized that he disparaged systems and gear he found to lack "it".

Interesting view.  From what I've read , the term "high-end" is such a grey area, it could mean anything, from the size of one's speakers, how many little lights are on one's amp, or the lack of them, to how pretty it looks with the wife's decor.

drdna wrote:

But I am worried what all my friends and neighbors will say if get up and start to dance to Lutoslowski!

Romy the Cat wrote:

...that the “observation of an observer” is the most “interesting” sexual activity. The caT

To celebrate Stereophile's 30th anniversary, Gordon gave a speech at a dinner the magazine hosted at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. The text of that speech was reprinted in our September 1992 issue, and it makes for disturbing reading:

"We seem to have come to a tacit agreement that it's no longer necessary, or even desirable, for a home music system to sound like the real thing. We speak in hushed and reverent tones about reproducing the ineffable beauty of music, when in fact much real music is harsh and vulgar and ugly. We design the all-important musical midrange out of our equipment in order to try—vainly, I might add—to recreate the illusion of three-dimensional space through what is essentially a two- dimensional reproducer. And whenever we hear a loudspeaker or a CD player that shows subversive signs of sounding more 'alive' or 'realistic' than most, we dismiss it out of hand as being too 'forward' or 'aggressive.' As if a lot of real music isn't forward and aggressive!

"The idea that all we are trying to do is make equipment that gives the listener some sort of magical emotional response to a mystical experience called 'music' is all well and good, but it isn't what High End is all about. In fact, high fidelity was originally a reaction to the gorgeously rich-sounding console 'boom boxes' that dominated the home-music market during the 1940s!

"We've lost our direction....The High End in 1992 is a multi-million-dollar business. But it's an empty triumph, because we haven't accomplished what we set out to do. The playback still doesn't sound 'just like the real thing.' People, let's start getting back to basics. Let's put the 're' back into 'reproduction.' Let's promote products that dare to sound as 'alive' and 'aggressive' as the music they are trying to reproduce."

Strong stuff. Fifteen years later, Gordon is comfortably retired in Boulder, Colorado. I e-mailed him Labor Day to ask him about that 1992 polemic. My questions are in italics, followed by Gordon's unexpurgated answers (footnote 2).

Do you still feel the high-end audio industry has lost its way in the manner you described 15 years ago?

Not in the same manner; there's no hope now. Audio actually used to have a goal: perfect reproduction of the sound of real music performed in a real space. That was found difficult to achieve, and it was abandoned when most music lovers, who almost never heard anything except amplified music anyway, forgot what "the real thing" had sounded like. Today, "good" sound is whatever one likes. As Art Dudley so succinctly said [in his January 2004 "Listening," see "Letters," p.9], fidelity is irrelevant to music.

Since the only measure of sound quality is that the listener likes it, that has pretty well put an end to audio advancement, because different people rarely agree about sound quality. Abandoning the acoustical-instrument standard, and the mindless acceptance of voodoo science, were not parts of my original vision.

I remember you strongly feeling back in 1992 that multichannel/surround reproduction was the only chance the industry had for getting back on course.

With fidelity in stagnation, spatiality was the only area of improvement left.

As you were so committed to surround, do you feel that the commercial failures of DVD-Audio and SACD could have been avoided?

I doubt it. No audio product has ever succeeded because it was better, only because it was cheaper, smaller, or easier to use. Your generation of music lovers will probably be the last that even think about fidelity.

Judging by online forums and by the e-mail I receive, there are currently three areas of passion for audiophiles: vinyl playback, headphone listening, and music servers. Are you surprised by this?

I find them all boring, but nothing surprises me any more.

Do you see any signs of future vitality in high-end audio?

Vitality? Don't make me laugh. Audio as a hobby is dying, largely by its own hand. As far as the real world is concerned, high-end audio lost its credibility during the 1980s, when it flatly refused to submit to the kind of basic honesty controls (double-blind testing, for example) that had legitimized every other serious scientific endeavor since Pascal. [This refusal] is a source of endless derisive amusement among rational people and of perpetual embarrassment for me, because I am associated by so many people with the mess my disciples made of spreading my gospel. For the record: I never, ever claimed that measurements don't matter. What I said (and very often, at that) was, they don't always tell the whole story. Not quite the same thing.

Remember those loudspeaker shoot-outs we used to have during our annual writer gatherings in Santa Fe? The frequent occasions when various reviewers would repeatedly choose the same loudspeaker as their favorite (or least-favorite) model? That was all the proof needed that [blind] testing does work, aside from the fact that it's (still) the only honest kind. It also suggested that simple ear training, with DBT confirmation, could have built the kind of listening confidence among talented reviewers that might have made a world of difference in the outcome of high-end audio.

Yet you achieved so much, Gordon.

I know I did, and my whole excuse for it—a love for the sound of live classical music—lost its relevance in the US within 10 years. I was done in by time, history, and the most spoiled, destructive generation of irresponsible brats the world has ever seen. (I refer, of course, to the Boomers.)