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| Posted by PC Corp:[The fact that] I enjoy listening to [$5 cans] won't make them Hi-End. Hi-End is a standard. That's why Stereophile has a rating list. And the standard is moving and moving. Only products at the very end spectrum could be called Hi-End products IMHO of course. |
The high-end is clearly a term that can be defined many ways. If you look at the Stereophile definition, it's a piece of equipment that costs more than at least 90% of the rest of equipment bought by hobbyists. It's also a piece of equipment produced by a company already established to be in the high-end.
How do these companies reach the status to be good enough to reach the ratings list that Stereophile makes? They do it several ways.
1)Paying for expensive advertisements.
2)Wining and dining reviewers and presenting other personal gifts and favors.
3)By getting their equipment stocked on the shelves of the audio stores that the reviewers own.
There has been a huge debate over this issue, especially as regards the new Sam Tellig review of the Musical Fidelity upsampling DAC on both the Audiogon and Audio Asylum message boards. We have lambasted the Stereophile lists here as well because it really is based on little than the above factors.
I have a certain feeling that you're adhering to this standard as well -- except you're not the one receiving the favors. Since someone else is receiving favors and because you probably paid thousands of dollars for the Levinson transport/DAC combo alone you consider that high end.
Fair enough. But realize that assumptions mean little in audio. One of the great things about this forum is its accessibility to people of lesser means -- that's why we have so many more high school students and college students (like myself) on these message boards. As Jude says, the fact that you can get decent headphones and amplification for under $200 helps a lot.
Headphones break a lot of assumptions. You pay $200 (or less, as in my case) for a pair of HD600 headphones, pay $400 (or less, as in my case) for a Melos SHA-1, pay $400 for a decidedly mid-fi digital source, and you have a system that can compete in terms of detail, musicality, and PRAT with a speaker system costing up to maybe three- to four-thousand dollars. You won't have the same soundstage, the same presentation, the same bass that you can feel in your bones. You won't have something that you don't need to wear on your head, something that a whole group of people can listen to at one time. And you'll have something you can see, a palpable return for your money.
And who doesn't want a lot in exchange for their money? I know that I do. When I buy a $10+ cigar in America that doesn't taste as good as cigars from a certain island south of Miami that cost half as much, I'm not happy. I look and look for something to make the cigar seem like it tasted better, but it doesn't.
When I bought my Marantz CD6000OSE CD player and soon afterwards found out I could have bought a Sony ES SACD player for around the same price, I wasn't too happy with my choice. When I got the Sony MZ-R900 minidisc player for over $350 when it just came out in Japan, and then the value has now dropped to $200 or less, that doesn't make me happy either.
But having heard a relatively great number of headphones and some of the best headphone amps around, I know not to judge a piece of audio equipment by anything but the sound that I hear and the feeling it evokes. Sure, I like showing off toys too. I paid almost twice as much for a humidor with barely better functionality just because the box itself looks better.
But if you're going to start judging audio equipment by these same standards, maybe you should consider suggesting that furniture magazines review equipment, not audio-equipment magazines.
High-end audio equipment, the way I see it, is equipment that produces sound with the greatest PRAT and musicality. It's something that will bring me close to Beethoven's string quartets, Prokofiev's piano concerto's, Mahler's symphonies, Thelonious Monk's piano. I don't care what I paid for the equipment, when I try to tell other people what high-end audio equipment is, I try to be as non-mindful of my cost as possible so that others don't have to try as hard as I did to get the system desired.
I know that price is a factor. You can't pay for a $50 DAC chip with $10 or for the design of a great analogue circuit with a spool of wire and a pat on the back at the end for a job well done.
It is certainly true that certain pieces of audio equipment will likely be appreciated as top-of-the-line by a large number of audiophiles even without knowledge of price, manufacturer, or others' thoughts on the items. But when you start making lists that classify what's on the higher end of the spectrum and what doesn't catch this gravy train that's "moving and moving," you add a facet of objectivity which really isn't there. No matter how hard somebody argues to me that Radiohead is inventive, creative, and simply amazing, I'll still say that it's a bunch of pretentious crap -- in my opinion. Because it's still my opinion.
Once you get to the point where the frequency range and timing is presented relatively honestly it all becomes subjectivity as to what's on the high end. Realize that Stereophile wants you to think otherwise because it earns them money. Lots of it.
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| I know your standard of Hi-End is different from mine. But thinking HD600's are Hi-End equipment is either (1) fooling youslef or (2) your Hi-End standard is very low IMHO. Of course there's a third chance that your standard is higher than mine and HD600's belong to you Hi-End standard, which is perfectly fine for me. And I should be happy for you because you've found what you're looking for. |
There is no "Hi-End" standard -- not that we know of, anyway. If we were to have someone who is unbiased and receiving money from a disinterested third party bring together a group of people with similar musical tastes and who have good hearing (oops, another standard to observe), maybe we could build brackets based on this status quo, perhaps even a good old-fashioned indifference curve. But this isn't what Stereophile -- or you, for that matter -- have done. Just let other people decide what is high-end for them and let it stay that way.
And to bring us back to the wonderful point that I think Jude made, to define the only standards that our hearing will allow us to create that may transcend, to a degree, the subjectivity of musical taste, we should only really compare equipment based on specific aspects of the sound. Wideness of soundstage, realism of image, the frequency spectrum, and perhaps PRAT (which is itself venturing into the extremely subjective). Beyond that, there's no real need for someone without money to earn and who respects his audience to tell someone else that his High End, his Holy Grail of sound, his audio Mecca, is not valid. Because people have nothing to rely on except their own perception of utility.
