Musos of a certain vintage – born, let’s say, the year of Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book and The Rolling Stones’ Exile On Main Street - have a pretty wide spectrum of experience behind them when it comes to quality of sound.
They recall hearing early Dire Straits via electrical audio signals that barely had the strength to hiss, crackle and pop their way through the single speaker cone of the single-deck tape recorder they got for Christmas. Due to the modesty of their parents’ record players, their early vinyl experiences probably lacked the warmth and authenticity of sound that these days has aficionados bickering online over whether aluminium or boron cantilevers are best for fluid tonality and tonal texture – but records certainly sounded fuller, more bassy, than those cassettes until the Sony Walkman came on the scene.
Moving on a decade or so, they nodded their heads sagely at the soulless/crisp-and-clear accuracy (depending on viewpoint) of CDs, then squinted with curiosity at the arrival on the scene of MiniDiscs. By now they were well into a journey of discovery that ultimately leads to an epiphany: the truism that quality sound is as far removed from poor sound – in terms of nuance, complexity and depth - as a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is from a bottle of Happy Shopper plonk.
It was to many a muso’s horror, if they did their homework, to discover in late 1992 that the MiniDisc had brought a gatecrasher to the party: digital compression technique. Compression is the biggest twist yet in an audio quality narrative that’s been unfolding since Thomas Edison first wrapped a sheet of tinfoil around a grooved metal cylinder in 1877. It’s no exaggeration to say that it’s completely revolutionised the way we listen to music.
The compression of digital music files, and its inevitable consequence – streaming, and the advent of access to rather than ownership of music libraries – has deprived us of far more than album notes, printed lyrics charming rows of spines on our shelves and the clumsily crayoned artwork that used to come with romantic-gesture playlists. It’s taken from us a sizeable portion of our favourite music’s finer brushstrokes, with frequencies deemed inaudible to the average human ear stripped out even though – according to some observers – they do, collectively, contribute to an overall natural sound.
So why does all this matter? It matters because full, rich, intricate sound makes our experience of listening to music more intimate, more moving, more gloriously overwhelming. Listen, on equipment developed by a brand whose R&D department spends its days obsessing over sonic reflections, resonances and phase cancellation, to an intimate live recording – let’s say Tom Waits’ Nighthawks at the Diner, an “Unplugged” classic or any number of post-war jazz sets – and that cliché about “actually being in the room” becomes an overpowering reality: even with compressed music files.
And the seriously good news for sound buffs is, technological progress being exponential rather than linear, the level of ingenuity going into audio equipment today is spellbindingly impressive. There are speakers out there for which you could pay the same price as you would for several Aston Martins, but happily, sound quality that is genuinely game-changing for music aficionados (whilst also offering sports and movie buffs in-stadium-slash-in-cinema experiences respectively) needn’t be an elitist experience.
One particularly sound investment (pun intended), for example, is the LS50 Collection from iconic British brand KEF. The two speakers in the collection – the ‘LS50 Meta’ loudspeaker and the ‘LS50 Wireless II’ wireless HiFi speaker - are the first units in the world to feature Metamaterial Absorption Technology , which sees a specially developed synthetic material remove all the distortion and audio distraction from reproduction. Combine that with Uni-Q technology (which homogenises the soundscape in the room) and other wizardry such as driver performance optimisation and constrained layer damping, and the result is a purity of sound that will make discerning listeners wonder how they ever endured lesser quality.
There are a surprising number of people out there who are passionate about music but have never experienced the joys of pitch-perfect mid-range frequencies mingling with glorious, harshness-free treble ones. If you ever witness a sonic neophyte experiencing it. For the first time, expect jaws to drop, eyebrows to hike and – in extreme cases – something like religious epiphany to be experienced.
About Nick Scott:
A former Editor in Chief at The Rake, Nick Scott also spent several years as a staffer at UK Esquire and GQ Australia, and has also contributed to the FT’s How To Spend It, The Observer and Director Magazine. He now applies his experience to the task of making Robb Report a powerful voice on the UK luxury media scene.nts with a passion for the history of audio, Ken is the author of Quad: The Closest Approach, McIntosh … For The Love Of Music, and Audio Research: Making the Music Glow and is co-author of Sound Bites: 50 Years of Hi-Fi News and KEF: Innovators In Sound. He is currently working on another four audio histories.
