BurningSmell

Hi-fi reviewers: Don’t believe their ears.

Nobody’s listening any more to the audio-voodoo of the hi-fi witch-doctors. Shouldn’t someone tell ’em?

It’s ironic. Back in the days when today’s baby-boomers were in their 20’s, high-end hi-fi was in its golden age and audio sources (8-track cartridges, cassette tapes, vinyl records) were crap.

Today, our best audio sources are damn near perfect but the game has moved on: music is now about portability and accessibility and nobody really gives a toss about what it actually sounds like. Big hi-fi may not be dead just yet, but it’s definitely on life support. Much, it has to be said, like its aging coterie of customers.

So what effect has this reversal had on the audio reviewers, the people who make a living from listening to hardware and telling you what you should like? Guess what, little or none.

Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world is now listening to recycled plastic lounge music on pip-squeak earbuds, or on tin-pot ‘lifestyle’ systems in cardboard closets, the golden-eared hi-fi hacks of the 33⅓ LP era are undaunted. They’re still churning out the same hyperbole, the same unscientific and unverifiable guff, about whatever bits of audio junk-jewellery the hi-fi fashionistas happen to dump on their doorstep.

…there’s a pretty decent chance that your favourite reviewer’s ears are well into chocolate-teapot territory.

And here’s the funniest bit: our stereo-pundits from the 70’s and 80’s are now in their 50’s and 60’s and beyond. Thanks to the immutable statistics of aging, there’s a pretty decent chance that your favourite reviewer’s ears are well into chocolate-teapot territory. More on this in a minute.

Music’s homoeopaths

Now, loads of people write silly twaddle for a living — I myself escape this definition only because I’m not making money out of this blog — and some of it’s jolly amusing. So you might be wondering whether I’m coming down a bit hard on these blokes. (They’re always blokes, by the way: there’s never been a female audio-equipment reviewer in humankind’s entire recorded history. Go figure.)

Here’s how I look at it: Hi-fi reviewers exist to provide a small but important service to their readers. Namely, to provide consistent, succinct and credible guidance on equipment; to cut through the waffly blather of manufacturers’ advertising copy with the cool, impartial insight of the independent investigator; and ultimately, to save potential buyers time, perhaps even money, by making it easier for them to choose equipment that will delight them.

And above all, as should be the case with any expert communicating with a non-expert audience, the key is to simplify and de-mystify: to strip away barriers to comprehension and enjoyment.

Had our golden-eared gurus stayed in this territory, they’d have been pretty darned useful. Instead, reviewer hubris and dumb editorial decisions allowed audio reviewing to descend into an unstructured mêlée of self-aggrandising poseurs, strong on opinion and weak on method. Any claim to objectivity was steadily eroded as reviewers became swept up in their own stylistic excesses and prima-donna posturing, ignoring their duty as trusted advisers to the steadily diminishing number of people who bothered to read their reviews.

Pretty soon, hi-fi reviewers had fallen off the edge of Occam’s razor into a thick slop of techno-snobbery and blustering implausibility that would’ve set off the bullshit detector of any smart five-year-old. For example, unless you’re a practitioner of Reiki or spirit healing, you’ll probably snigger at review snippets like these — remember, what’s being described here are expensive-but-dumb metal boxes with a few coloured wires in them:

“… overall sound has a remarkably vibrant energy”

Bring out those sacred crystals, man.

“… explosive bass has a lean muscularity”

Uh-huh. Speakers with a six-pack. Buy my tired cliché, fix your virility problem.

“… sound quality is moderately upbeat, with quite good rhythm and good timing, showing decent synchronicity over the whole frequency range.”

In this vein we get sentences and paragraphs with no detectable meaning, about concepts so laughably implausible and unscientific that they’re right up there with homoeopathy and healing crystals.

The bit that really used to get my goat about the stereo snake-oil salesmen was their tendency to dress their daft meanderings in the clothing of honest disciplines such as maths, statistics and science. Instead of writing:

“Listening to the Zinn Ultrika Poobah Titanium 12 made me want to leap up and dance…”

… which would at least transmit human exuberance inside a wrapper of honest subjectivity, the high priests of hi-fi typically preferred to drop into a faux-objective third-person mode (“the test unit was placed on a high-mass surface and power was applied to it”). Done consistently, this mode of writing pulled the reviewer’s woolly reasoning over your eyes; you started to believe you were reading a work of dispassionate scientific observation.

…the resulting stew of empty calories could bamboozle even the alert reader.

Not that reviewers’ voices were always so passive. At some point they would go crazy with perfumed prose, bodice-ripping bombast and lurid analogy. Slathered with loads of pseudo-technical trivia, the resulting stew of empty calories could bamboozle even the alert reader.

For example, if you were looking to spend $1,600 on a phono cartridge (the pointy needle bit that rides the grooves of a vinyl record), surely you deserved better advice than:

“… thick but clear, with mountains of texture and a nearly indescribable sense of wood and varnish.” [Link to review]

Likewise, I’d have been a disappointed punter indeed had I needed to rely on this gushing gent’s review of another $2,850 vinyl-scraper:

“… the recently designed EMT JSD 5 is like rolling around in a pile of freshly raked leaves on a crisp autumn day with a thickly built girl who loves you for who you are. Seriously.” [Link to review]

Oooh. More Mills & Boon than Scientific American. Mind you, at least the subjectivity is undisguised, unlike this fellow’s work:

“Tone is exceptional and deeply hued. Images have a lot of body. There’s plenty of detail revealed with natural texture. The detail is not at all etched, rather being more rounded, organic and natural which is quite a feat… The agility across the range of micro to macro dynamics is particularly impressive.” [Link to review]

… which is probably reusable with equal vagueness in a review of a new digital camera. Or a prize rose. (Fortunately, digital camera gurus tend to write honestly and scientifically. I don’t know how it is for prize roses.)

And how about this ditzy gem to describe a CD player?

“It had a sense of ease that was nothing short of remarkable. There was no edge, no grit, no haze, no hyper detail…” [Link to review]

And this next reviewer no doubt went home well pleased with a day’s work that included this description of an amplifier:

“… the Majik is tonally cool, even thin by some standards, and this is coupled with an intrinsic friendliness. It’s poised and proper.” [Link to review]

Hey, why bother doing serious measurement and evaluation when a thesaurus is to hand? It was down to the reader to remember that what was being read was the stylistic whim of a word-juggler rather than the work of a trained practitioner of the scientific method.

Don’t believe their ears.

A key part of being a high-end hi-fi reviewer was, apparently, the ability to hear subtleties completely imperceptible to ordinary mortals. Or to dogs, cats and laboratory oscilloscopes, for that matter.

Over the years, I’ve seen prima donna hi-fi writers go into a hand-wringing tizz because a telephone was present in their listening room. They’d have you believe that the tiny loudspeaker inside the handset created an audible coloration in the sound of the speakers under test. Bless.

I’ve seen them complain about ‘unclean’ mains voltages and connecting cables that sound better in one direction than another. Alert readers routinely snigger at the more outrageous claims (sunlight reducing the quality of the sound of a high-end audio system). And in one review of the reviewers, you can almost hear the author shift uncomfortably in his chair when a fellow audio reviewer claims to prefer the sound of a loudspeaker when its discreet illuminated logo is switched off. (Honest, I’m not making this up.)

Yet, as I alluded to earlier on, these golden-eared gurus are making their comically fine judgements about high-fidelity audio while listening with what could well be low-fidelity equipment: their aging ears.

For one thing, there’s this condition called Presbycusis — age-related hearing loss — which starts from as early as age 30 and goes on to affect something like 83% of adults over the age of 55 (report). So the reviewer quotes I’ve cited here may well have come from gentlemen who really have no use for a tweeter.

Next, a six-year study into people working in the music and audio industries confirms that this group is especially prone to another form of auditory debilitation, Noise-Induced Hearing Loss. As the research audiologist working on the report puts it:

“Study results confirm what we’ve suspected for a long time. These groups not only have high-frequency hearing damage from over-exposure to loud sounds, they also acquire it earlier than individuals in the general population, who may experience a high-frequency hearing loss as they age.”

Just how debilitating these losses can be is apparent in this chart, which plots the decline of hearing by age and sound frequency. [Note: Owing to the design of the target website, you’ll need to scroll down to Presbycusis in the left column, then click.]

In other words, these verbose listening aides may well need to wear hearing aids. Of course, it’s possible that, somehow, they’re blessed with immunity from lughole decay. Funny thing, though: I’ve never seen any of high-end hi-fi’s audio ayatollahs publish an audiometrist’s chart of their own hearing frequency response.

Wonder why.