Music & HiFi Appreciations

For years, “music listening experience” has been the central phrase in my writing about home audio. It felt like the right focus: subjective, personal, resistant to the objectivist fantasy that systems can be evaluated independently of listeners. The experience is what matters, not measurements or orthodoxies about “accuracy”. But the phrase has problems I can no longer ignore. “Experience” is…

I used to use the term “audition” when writing about listening. Not in the audiophile sense—auditioning components, running A/B tests, cataloguing sonic attributes—but in an older, more formal sense: audition as the faculty of hearing itself, the structured perceptual capacity to attend to and make sense of sonic events. Something closer to how “vision” names both the faculty and its exercise,…

For musical listening, a home audio system exists to render recordings into sonic events that facilitate attunement: the state in which you become part of the music rather than remaining outside it, analysing. That’s the working definition, and it’s held up reasonably well as a way of thinking about what playback systems are actually for. But it contains an unexamined assumption: that…

The “golden ears” mythology collapses rather dramatically under a rendering framework, because it fundamentally mistakes the object of evaluation. The standard golden ears claim is that certain individuals possess superior auditory discrimination—they can hear finer distinctions in frequency response, lower levels of distortion, subtler timing cues, and so on. This frames audio evaluation as a…

Hugh Padgham and the Conditions for Attunement Hugh Padgham’s birthday passed yesterday, one of those minor calendar notifications that social media surfaces. But it caught my attention because Padgham’s name appears with unusual frequency in my listening: Phil Collins, Genesis, Kate, Bush, The Police, XTC, The Human League, Robbie Robertson, Paul Young, Black, Clannad, Suzanne Vega, Tears for…

Oh dear, another list of albums: “These are the albums people bring out when they want to flex their rig and prove they’re not old people who only listen to old music.“ https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/05/best-mastered-albums-century/ Ha—yes, the defensive crouch is palpable. “We’re not just banging on about Dark Side again, honest!“ Let’s have a look at what made the cut… So we’ve got the…

Here’s another product review that looks odd to me: “Following his rave review of the PowerQuest 505 power conditioner, Litemagazin’s Volker Frech spends quality time with its bigger, more accomplished brother, the PowerQuest 707, comparing it against the wall and a tangle of typical power strips. The results were unambiguous. With the PQ-707 in his system, Frech noted deeper silences, more…

Home audio, properly understood, exists to render recordings into sonic events that facilitate attunement: the state in which you become part of the music rather than remaining outside it, analysing. But a great deal of audiophile activity has surprisingly little to do with achieving this goal. Instead, it constitutes what might be called audiophile theatre—the performance of concern about…

The claim circulates widely: Alva Noto’s recordings are exemplary test material for high-end audio systems, prized for their “precise imaging, dynamic range, and textural depth”. Audiophile forums recommend Xerrox Vol. 3 or HYbr:ID III as system evaluation tools. The assertion carries a whiff of cultural legitimacy—here’s experimental, conceptually serious electronic music that also happens to…

The Freive Audio Review rankings includes cost-performance ratio. Is the price reasonable compared to the world’s cheapest product with equivalent performance? This is from the website: “Calculated using world’s cheapest product price with equivalent performance divided by the price of the reviwed product. If no product with equivalent or better functionality and measurement performance exists…

On returning to the Frieve Audio Review website, I discovered that there’s an associated book (online via a link at the site, see below). Core Thesis Frieve-A (Yoshiyuki Kobayashi) argues that audio reproduction has reached its physical “end” — the engineering problems have been solved — but the industry and audiophile community refuse to acknowledge this, instead sustaining themselves through…

This is someone on reddit/audiophile claiming that adding a large houseplant has “changed radically” the sound of their system (Dynaudio AIR 15 monitors with an Eversolo DMP-A8 streamer/DAC). The comment underneath—”Must be an acoustic plant”—is gently mocking the claim. And yes, it’s worth mocking, but there’s something more interesting here than just credulity or placebo. The plant is…

A record shop worker, pricing up stock, picks up Lyle Lovett’s Joshua Judges Ruth. Unfamiliar artist, slightly austere cover—instinct says bin it or stick a quid on it. Then comes the Discogs check, and surprise: this is a “desirable” record commanding significant money. The worker’s assessment shifts immediately, not because anything about the object has changed, but because its social status…

I didn’t know Michael Friedman’s work until I found his 1995 album I Never Knew What Hit Me Until Now (a rather apt title, as it turns out). What struck me immediately wasn’t the songwriting or the playing—though both are compelling—but the rendering itself: dynamic, crisp, forward, detailed. More specifically, the combination of vocal proximity and sense of space. The voice sits close and…

The negative consequences: Treating home audio as reproduction of captured music installs a hierarchy where the “original” event (usually live performance) sits at the top, and everything that follows is measured by fidelity to that moment. This creates several problems: Endless deferral of satisfaction. You’re always chasing something you weren’t present for. The listening experience becomes…

Rethinking Production, Playback, and the Listening Rendering There’s a striking asymmetry at the heart of audiophile practice that rarely gets examined directly. We have essentially zero control over production rendering—the sum of all choices made in recording, mixing, and mastering—except in the binary sense of choosing to play a recording or not. But we have substantial, even obsessive…

It’s a useful framework to think of both production of a recording and listening as rendering processes, each with their own transformations and constraints. Production rendering process Acoustic event → transduction → electrical signal → storage medium Sound source (instrument, voice, ambient space) Already has spatial, timbral, dynamic characteristics Exists in a particular acoustic…