Forward Through The Look-Back

Way back when—so long ago Isaac Asimov was still with us, that great human bridge between what was, what is and what could be—I was reading what was likely my first sci-fi book, Foundation & Empire and working my way through Fundamentals of Acoustics by Kinsler et al. Within the space between those two great works I was thinking about the historical and then current differences in sound reproduction priorities within the various music, playback and sound reinforcement disciplines. The distinctions were generally pretty clear but one emerging aspect within home playback was not. While most every other musical arts guild searched for vibrancy—One Note, Tone, The Big Note—hi-fi in the early ‘90s was chasing the visual and the concrete, and what was being held up as the absolute sound was at least half nonsense. It appeared that the insecure—influencers, greed-heads, deep-pocketed users—were pushing and chasing the visually represented, data gerrymandered out of the whole of the sound profile and graphed to look good, and the gear also visually reflected this phony fidelity shift. Yeah, hi-fi in the ‘90s generally sucked, it sounded clinical and dead, clinically dead.

I have written on my observations of this a few times. Here’s an old excerpt Zu published and likely one contributing reason to the desert-wondering Hi-Fi went through:

Because more and more 'stuff' can be measured, people measure more and more stuff, and frequently, the stuff they measure takes on such import for measurement's sake that all kinds of bad things are done to a design to ensure a good measured result, but at the expense of a raft of musically important stuff that doesn't feature on the measurement guru's agenda. 

While the above is me looking back, and with kid gloves, your perceptive is likely different. The authority on your tone and your experience is you, your ears, your reason, your mind. Maybe your experience is similar, maybe not. If not, and you aren’t much younger than fifty, you were likely reading Sound Practices, Glass Audio, ham radio digests and many of the great acoustics books written between 1863 and about 1985. I will go further into what was and what might have been going on back in the ‘90s with the next article, but if you would like to post your perspective I would appreciate the insight.