State of the High-End art – Take Three…
While print magazines thrive on individual product reviews (and the safe promise of advertising dollars that they represent) this decades-old obsession with the quality and character of individual components has significantly warped the way in which we view the challenges of achieving high-end musical performance. Almost by default, it has created a situation in which the answer to every audio problem, whether provided by a magazine or a dealer, is either a different box or another box. But that ignores the basic fact that you can’t actually listen to an amplifier, a speaker or any part of a record player in isolation. You can only listen to a system – and the interaction between the various parts within that system, especially the amp(s) and speakers, is sufficiently complex to make identifying the contribution of any particular part almost impossible. At least, impossible beyond the specific system context in which you are listening to it…
There’s a whole debate to be had here, about review methodology, the flaws in current practice and how those flaws undermine the vast majority of audio reviews. In fact, whether most reviews are worth the paper they’re printed on or the electricity that illuminates their pixels? Even a cursory examination of the issues should leave you in no doubt that the dominant approach so beloved of reviewers and magazines alike – the ‘reference system – one in/one out’ model –simply isn’t fit for purpose: at least not without a whole raft of qualifications and adaptations, adaptions that in practice rarely if ever occur.
But that’s for another time and another place. What I’m more interested in here is a switch of focus, from individual products to complete systems: systems that qualify as such, by delivering more than the sum of their parts; systems that defy the popular notion of the law of diminishing returns (by doing the job properly and actually maximising component and system performance); systems that bracket the current extremes of high-end audio performance. In other words, where high-end starts, the current level of what might be described as ‘attainable high-end’ (the sort of system to which most audiophiles might actually aspire) and finally, a system that flirts with the upper edge of the high-end audio performance envelope, as demanding of space and situation as it on the wallet. Let’s look at the State Of The Nation. Let’s look at it in the shape of those three distinct systems…
