So I think overall we’re in a much better place these days as we have access to great-sounding music with the convenience of wireless streaming from our phones using Bluetooth or wi-fi." "It’s really about everything along the audio stream - from recording, mixing, mastering, digital file format encoding/decoding, and finally to the consumer gear we use to listen. And for Audioengine, our approach is to use the best-sounding modern DAC, supported with old-school audio circuits, amps, drivers, and cabinet designs and that all fit without our budget for each product."
"So these days, when most everything is fake and phony, 'high fidelity' for me isn’t always about specs and all that, but simply about what sounds good, regardless of the bit rate and/or bit depth, format, or anything else. MQA, Bluetooth aptX and aptX-HD, LDAC codecs and the various versions of each are real game-changers, which are optimized for streaming and sound fantastic in most cases." But since then we’ve seen changes with variable bitrate (VBR) encoding and decoding. "Back in the old days (3-4 years ago) our enthusiastic audiophile customer base would push us to go for the highest bit and sample rates possible, which we did. "My take on 'high fidelity' is that wireless audio and streaming - mostly from phones - has changed the audio game for the better." Whichever product does this best provides the most 'fidelity'."īrady Bargenquast, co-founder of Audioengine Reproduction of sound depends upon moving air with accuracy.
#Reckless records high fidelity full#
Folks who are using cheap earbuds, or just the speakers that come with their phones, really don’t experience the full 'fidelity' of their music. "And then we come to the other end of the spectrum: the reproduction. Some 24/44.1 tracks sound much better than 24/192 'other' tracks, simply because their original was better. how well the original sound was captured. Quality or 'fidelity' also depends largely on the original recording, i.e. Many would say the higher the better, but keep in mind, the bit rate/word depth number does not always tell the whole story. "Nowadays, is kind of a moving target depending who you ask. With vinyl, there is a difference in phono cartridges that will have a similar effect as the CD player's DAC does as to how pure the playback is."Ĭhase Pellerin Dave Evans, co-founder of Audioengine Take CD for instance, it has to be decoded from digital to analog, and the capabilities of the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) will have direct impact on the fidelity. To distinguish the different levels of hi-fi comes down to the technology built into the equipment. To be considered hi-fi, the equipment must be capable of playback with very low distortion, low signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic headroom and channel separation just to name a few. "When used to describe equipment, 'hi-fi' means to be able to reproduce recordings of all types CD, vinyl or streaming. The following quotes have been edited for clarity and brevity.Ĭharlie Randall, co-CEO of the McIntosh Group Of course there's no one answer, but here's what they had to say. We asked seven industry experts and audio enthusiasts for their modern definition of hi-fi. So should the bar for hi-fi go up in response? In the past, hi-fi was generally defined as audio that was CD or vinyl quality (16-bit/44.1 kHz), but today you can listen to higher resolution audio files (such as 24-bit/192kHz or even even 32-bit/384 kHz). The tricky bit in the modern day is that so many mediums - CDs, vinyl, streaming, even tapes - are in play, and different formats can have different fidelities. Many of today's music streaming services (including Apple Music, Amazon Music HD, Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz) offer a lossless streaming tier, meaning you can listen to digital audio files that are the same or better audio quality than a CD. What hi-fi is may be a point of contention, but lossy compression certainly does not fit the bill. In the 90s, quality took a detour as the age of Napster and the iPod ushered in the dominance of compressed digital audio files like the MP3, which destroy data in their quest to get file size down.
Perhaps more importantly, CDs were one of the first mainstream digital audio formats, which helped pave the way to today's digital streaming age. In the early 1980s, CDs came along and eliminated a lot of the extra noise, like the crackling and other imperfections that like vinyl is now sought out for. "It made such an impact on recorded sound that people started referring to a ‘Hi-fi’ as a ‘Stereo’," explained Alex Munro, the brand director at Q Acoustics. With the addition of a second speaker, or second channel, stereo was able to add another layer of realism to the music. In the 1970s, the definition of hi-fi evolved with the introduction of stereo sound.
The Argument Against a Wireless Hi-Fi System
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