wilson@inteloc.UUCP (11/23/83)
I used to be an audiophile. In the early and mid-70's I read all the magazines, visited the salons, assembled a component system piece by piece. Then I became a husband and a father, and my time and money have been spent on other pursuits. And, frankly, the components I bought back when I was an audiophile (Linn-Sondek turntable, Audio Research pre-amp, Hafler power amp, Rogers LS 3/5A speakers, home-built subwoofer and crossover) work so well that I saw no reason to upgrade the system just to have the "preamp of the month." Now along come Compact Disc's (CD's). In technical terms, they promise much: lower noise, wider dynamic range, freedom from ticks and pops, tracking error and feedback. On paper, they look very impressive. My question is: do they deliver more realism, or just better hi-fi? Let me try to clarify that a bit. As good as I think my system is, it is incapable of convincing me that Glen Gould is really sitting in my living room playing the Goldberg variations. On the best program material, under ideal listening conditions, it can come close.... but, on most program material it lacks the dynamic range, the freedom from noise, and (most importantly) the imaging needed to recreate the concert hall. To my mind, the only fundamental advance in sound reproduction in recent decades was stereo. Other innovations -- transistors, moving coil cartridges, noise reduction schemes -- made sound systems more affordable or solved some technical problems (often at the cost of introducing different types of distortion). Even stereo, of course, is by no means an unequivocally good thing. I would much rather listen to good, clean mono (old Mercury LP's, for instance) than multi-miked, unconvincing stereo. Someone responded to a recent discussion in this newsgroup about amplifier characteristics needed for CD's by saying that his Onkyo speakers and 45-watt receiver seemed to work just fine. My initial reaction to this was incredulity. There is no way that such a system could reproduce the dynamic range and frequency response claimed for CD's. It couldn't even come close. Then I reflected more. This person is not asking for state of the art performance from his system; he wants a pleasurable, musical experience. His CD player serves as an improved source of "hi-fi" without many of the deficiencies of analog records, and on those terms his receiver is no doubt perfectly adequate. So is that all CD's really offer? Or do they bring Glen Gould a step closer to your living room? I might become an audiophile again and start investing in new components if they could provide increased realism. I'd be interested in responses from readers. Andy Wilson ..icalqa!omsvax!inteloa!wilson