Diverse I had slowly started confusing performance with connection.

[Ketil]

Føler meg til dels truffet av budskapet i videoen. Flere som gjør det samme?

Transkripsjon:

If you've spent enough time in this hobby, you've probably noticed something.

Today, we have access to more information than ever before. Better measurements, better engineering, better reviews, better products. And honestly, I think that's a wonderful thing.

We understand loudspeakers better than we ever have. We know more about room acoustics. We have access to incredible equipment at just about every price point. And if you're willing to spend a little time learning, there's never been a better time to build a great-sounding system.

And yet, I can't help but wonder if somewhere along the way, many of us—including me—have become just a little disconnected from the very thing that got us into hi-fi in the first place.

Now, before anyone misunderstands me, this isn't a video about measurements. It isn't a video about gear. It isn't a video about cables, DACs, amplifiers, or frequency response.

No. This is a video about us.

Because after years of reviewing equipment, measuring speakers, collaborating on loudspeaker designs, and spending countless hours chasing better sound, I've come to realize something.

The greatest gift this hobby has ever given me wasn't better sound. It was something much more valuable than that.

And today, I want to see if we can find it again.

The funny thing is, I don't think I noticed it happening. It just slowly crept in.

There was a time when I couldn't have told you what a speaker's frequency response looked like. I didn't know the difference between a soft-dome tweeter and a planar. I couldn't have explained why someone would choose diffusion over absorption on their front wall.

I knew almost nothing.

And yet, track after track, album after album, I found myself completely captivated. Curious. Wondering what the next song would sound like. Excited to discover a new artist. Excited to share that experience with someone else.

Looking back, I don't think that I was chasing better sound.

I was chasing connection.

I just didn't know how to describe it yet.

Somewhere along the way, though, something changed.

Not overnight. Not because somebody told me to think differently.

It just slowly crept in.

As I learned more, as I measured more, as I became more aware of what I was actually hearing, I noticed that I was spending less time asking myself, How does this make me feel?

And more time asking, How well does this perform?

And those are not the same questions.

You know, curiosity is a funny thing.

My children have it naturally. They don't need Dad's permission to wonder. They don't need me to explain to them why something is beautiful before they believe it.

They simply experience it.

Now, looking back, I think that's exactly how I approached music.

I wasn't listening for imaging. I wasn't listening for directivity. I wasn't listening for distortion.

I was listening because I couldn't wait to hear what happened next.

But as I learned, as I became educated, as I became more aware, something else quietly entered the room.

Facts.

Now, don't misunderstand me.

Facts are wonderful. Knowledge is wonderful. And measurements are wonderful.

They have made me a better reviewer, and I genuinely believe they've made our hobby better.

But somewhere along the way, I started confusing understanding something with experiencing it.

There was even a season where I convinced myself that measurements could tell me how much I was about to enjoy a loudspeaker before I actually listened to it.

If a speaker measured beautifully, surely I would connect with it.

Then I started reviewing more speakers.

Some measured wonderfully and left me emotionally cold.

Others measured wonderfully and completely captivated me.

Then, down the road, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Danny on the Allie and Maddie loudspeakers.

Now, that experience changed the way that I thought about measurements forever.

As we listened to different crossover parts, experimented with the network, and watched the final frequency response come together, something dawned on me.

A frequency response graph tells me where a speaker ended up.

It doesn't tell me how it got there.

It doesn't tell me what the soundstage is going to do. It doesn't tell me whether the speakers disappear. It doesn't tell me whether or not I'm going to lose track of time when I listen to those speakers.

And that's when I realized I had slowly started confusing performance with connection.

Folks, I have spent years trying to become a better reviewer, a better listener, and a better communicator.

I've learned more about this hobby than I ever imagined that I would.

And honestly, I am grateful for every bit of it.

But after all these years, I think I'm starting to realize something.

The thing that I was chasing at the very beginning was actually the most important thing of all.

Now, I wish I could tell you that once I realized that, I never drifted again.

But that wouldn't be true.

Even today, I still catch myself headed down the same old road.

The difference is, now I know what to look for.

One of the first places I catch myself drifting has to do with measurements.

There was a season where I honestly believed that if a speaker measured beautifully, I was going to love it.

Today, I do actually appreciate measurements more than I ever have.

And again, they have made me a better reviewer.

They've even deepened my appreciation for great engineering, and they've given me another way to understand what I'm hearing.

But every now and then, I have to stop and ask myself:

Am I trusting this graph more than I'm trusting my own emotional response?

Because measurements can tell me a lot about how a speaker behaves.

They just can't tell me whether that speaker is going to move me.

If I ever find myself forgetting that, maybe it's time to slow down.

Another place that I catch myself drifting is money.

I have had the privilege of spending time with some incredibly expensive systems.

Some of them were absolutely breathtaking.

Others left me feeling strangely disconnected.

Then I would sit down in front of something far less expensive and completely lose track of time.

And that's when I started to realize that price can absolutely buy you a lot of things.

It just can't guarantee a deeper connection.

So every now and then, I have to ask myself:

Am I believing that one more upgrade is going to give me what I'm actually searching for?

If the answer is yes, maybe it's time to slow down.

And folks, the interesting thing is this: there isn't anything wrong with measurements, or beautiful craftsmanship, or brand heritage, or expensive equipment. In fact, I've learned to appreciate all of those things more than I ever have.

I just have to be careful that I never mistake them for the reason I fell in love with this hobby.

Hear me. I don't want to love the hobby more than I love the music that brought me here. Because behind every deck, every turntable, every amplifier, and every loudspeaker, there's a signal. And behind that signal, there's a being — someone who had something to say, someone who created something beautiful, someone who turned joy or grief or hope or heartbreak into music.

And somehow, across years, across countries, across languages, that music found its way into our listening rooms.

Think about your favorite song for a moment. Not because it sounds incredible, but because it means something to you.

Why? What is it about that song that still reaches into your life after all these years?

I don't think that the answer lives in a frequency response, or a waterfall plot, or the price tag on your system. I think it lives somewhere much deeper than that.

And if we're lucky, a great hi-fi system gets out of the way just enough that we can hear it.

That's what this hobby has always been about for me. Not collecting equipment, not winning debates, not proving that I was right about this or that.

Just removing one more barrier between me and another human being.

Which is why I care enough to make this video. Because I've been lost more times than I can count. I've chased technical jargon. I've blindly believed opinions simply because enough people repeated them.

I've let all of those distractions slowly crowd out my curiosity, my wonder, even my trust in my own emotional response.

And I don't think I'm alone.

I care because I genuinely want to help people who are just now discovering this hobby. I care because I want to help those of us who have been here for decades.

I care because I believe hi-fi can be one of the healthiest hobbies a person can have.

In a world filled with noise, uncertainty, and chaos, music has an incredible way of grounding us, helping us heal, helping us remember, helping us connect.

That's the glue. It's universal.

And the beautiful thing is, it's available to every single one of us.

You don't need another upgrade. You don't need another review. You don't need permission from me or anyone else to enjoy the music that moves you.

You just have to press play.

And maybe that's all we ever needed to remember.

Thank you for watching

 

[Håkon_Rognlien]

Ønsker ikke at dette eminente innlegget bare forsvinner. Rett nok er noe av det samme turnert under tråden:
Tanker rundt opplevelser av vokalgjengivelse; hva er "rett"?
Nu vel, mye av det som fremføres i innlegget over, er ting jeg selv har forsøkt å formidle i årenes løp, men jeg må si det ovenstående er eminent formulert.

For ærlig talt forstår jeg knapt ideen med vår hobby, om ikke den gir en emosjonell opplevelse etter den innledende imponatorfaktor har falmet i tilvenningens lys. Jeg har hørt fulltstendig fantastiske anlegg som ikke gir meg noe annet enn grandiositet, mens moderate anlegg, gjerne vintage, kan gi gåsehud som f... selv uten at de mest grunnleggende kriterier er fullt ut oppfylt. Det ligger et "noe" begravet her, og dette "noe" ser ikke ut til å være en del av målingene i de mest "perfekte" og grandiose oppsettene.
Det er et mysterium.

 

[Ketil]

Musikk er jo følelser, kunnskap og teknologi er bare hjelpemidlene for å formidle disse følelsene. At man får interesse og fasinasjon for teknologien er det ingenting galt i. Men slik jeg oppfatter hovedpoenget i videoen handler det om krysningspunktet der man begynner å forveksle det tekniske aspektet ved fremføringen med det følelsesmessige aspektet.

Jeg synes YouTuberen nedenfor får ganske godt frem det poenget.

Transkripsjon:

This phono stage cost $15,000, and I had it in my rack for about a month. It almost led to the biggest hi-fi mistake I've made in my journey in the last few years. And the only thing that stopped me was really the old record that was passed down to me by my mother.


Without it, I almost made a mistake that almost every audiophile makes at some point during their journey.


There's a pattern in hi-fi that eventually catches up to everyone. We take years building our systems, carefully curating each component, and we eventually run across a component that we really, really vibe with. We really dig it. We really love its sound, and we have no desire to upgrade.


Until that one day a new piece of gear comes out on the market, and you start to wonder. Everyone's raving about it. All the reviewers are giving it glowing reviews. All the people that you trust are saying this might be a game changer.


And then you ask yourself: is what I personally have been rocking a compromise all along? Can there be something better?


That's the trap.


And the trap is so good because new gear is almost always technically better. And you're not even lying to yourself, because chances are the new gear does measure better these days, and it does have a lower noise floor, and it does draw more detail from your music.


The trap is mistaking better for better for you.


And while I tell you the story in my own journey, I want you to think about yours, because every audiophile watching this had a similar moment. A version of this moment of your own. A piece of gear that you almost replaced. An upgrade that you chased but didn't. Or an upgrade that you did chase and regretted.


I want to hear all about it, so keep that in mind, and I want to hear about it at the end of this video.


Now, about a month ago, I walked into this trap. I almost spent $15,000 climbing out in the wrong way. And the only reason that I didn't was because of one record.


This is what happened.


So the piece that I was about to replace was the Allnic H7000V tube phono stage, and it has been the heart of my analog setup for the last three years. It's really the single piece of equipment, the first piece of equipment, where I felt like I didn't need to upgrade anymore, and I could just listen.


And I should also tell you that I'm not a neutral observer when it comes to tube versus solid state, when it comes to phono stages. I've tried a lot of different solid-state phono stages in my early days of my journey, and I just didn't vibe with them. You know, they had detail. They had a low noise floor for sure. But they just didn't move me emotionally. They didn't engage me with the music with the sense of body and the realism that tube phono stages bring to the table.


You know, the way the tubes portray the 3D of instruments, where it feels natural, open, and holographic, as if it's placed inside your room. The breath behind the vocals that just gives you goosebumps down your spine.


And that's something that I always almost felt was missing from solid-state phono stages.


So I stayed mostly with tube phono stages until today.


But over the last few months, the analog guys that I respect, the analog experts I've learned a lot from, have been telling me that the Accuphase C57 is different. That this might be the one that converts me.


So I called up Peter from Motive Distributions and asked him if I could borrow an Accuphase C57 for about a month to do a real shootout. Same room, same records, back and forth.


And Peter said yes. So thank you, Peter. This video does not happen without you.


Now I want to be really honest about how this went, because the trap that I want you to recognize starts here.


When I first hooked up the Accuphase C57 and first sat down to listen to it, I almost made the decision to switch out my Allnic within the first week.


I mean, this tells you who you're dealing with. I didn't quite understand knobs until I owned an Accuphase. Every control has weight, damping, machine precision the rest of the industry has mostly given up on.


I visited their factory last year. They still service 40-year-old units with the original engineers, the same people who built them, now older, still at the bench.


That's not branding. That's heritage you can hold in your hand, and you feel it the moment this thing goes on the rack.


So for the first week, I just kind of lived with it. I tried many different speakers, many different amplifiers, especially with the Accuphase E-700. Honestly, one of the most coherent solid-state stacks I've ever heard.


The technical story matters here because it's the story that almost convinced me.


The C57 is a fully balanced dual-mono design, with separate signal paths for left and right. Their ANC circuit pulls the noise to a place I didn't know was possible from a phono stage.


The first time I dropped the needle on this thing, I thought something was wrong. The space between instruments was completely black. Not low hiss, not a low noise floor, but completely dark. Pitch black.


Nothing felt clustered. Everything felt very distinctive and separated. Simple attacks had their own very separate events, with pitch darkness between those notes.


And when it comes to bass, it gained an outline of the bass notes that I never knew even existed within the recordings that I was playing.


And that airy presentation, that air around the instruments, was something that was always disappointing for me with solid-state phono stages. But with the Accuphase C57, that was just not the case.


By day three, I was playing audiophile pressings I know very well and have heard countless times.


By day five, I was playing them back to back and didn't want to stop. And for the first time in three years, I had decided I was going to replace it.


And this is exactly where the trap closes on you.


For context, my front end is the Pure Fidelity Symphony turntable with the Origami PU7 Reference tonearm. And the cartridge is the Etsuro Urushi Cobalt Blue cartridge from Japan.


This cartridge is balanced in its sound signature, much like a well-made katana. And honestly, both phono stages worked beautifully with this cartridge. They had different flavors, but neither was a mismatch.


The Accuphase passed the synergy test cleanly.


And this is exactly when I realized that I was about to fall into this trap, because I had no more excuses left.


The pairing was excellent. The Accuphase sounded really amazing. All my audiophile recordings sounded absolutely stunning with the Accuphase.


Going into week two, I made a decision to go through every piece of music that I have ever used in my collection to assess gear in the last three years. And that's a lot of them.


And honestly, those sessions were thrilling.


The C57 took my best recordings and made them better. Better imaging, better separation, better bass definition, and also the effortlessness from top to bottom.


And there were some really magical moments.


I pulled out a record that I'd owned for 15 years and played continuously. And when I put this on, I heard an ambience from the right channel that I'd never, ever heard before. Not in any system, not in any room.


And really, I think that was the moment that I made the decision to get rid of my Allnic and replace it with the Accuphase C57, and make a video telling people how I was wrong about solid-state phono stages all along.


The Accuphase C57 really earned it.


Then I put on one more record.


This is the record that saved me fifteen thousand dollars.


There's a section in my collection that didn't come from a shop. It came down from my grandfather and my mother's collection. Records that played in rooms I grew up in. Records with stories I don't even fully know. Songs that were in the kitchen. Songs that were in the car. Songs someone in my family chose to keep when they didn't keep much else.


And these records were, by audiophile standards, not really great pressings. Sometimes the mastering was poorly done. The vinyl quality itself can be really bad sometimes and have a lot of surface noise introduced. And there's no record cleaner in the world that can fix that.


And most importantly, they've been around for a very long time. So they've been moved countless times, stored countless times, and most importantly, they've been loved countless times, meaning I played them quite a bit.


And the Accuphase did exactly what it was built to do.


It told the truth.


Every flaw of the mastering. Every flaw of the surface noise and the vinyl quality. Every little thing was portrayed. Every little flaw was surgically drawn from the record and portrayed into my system without softening, forgiveness.


And I knew, sitting on that chair that day, that I was about to make a fifteen-thousand-dollar mistake.


Not because the Accuphase is a bad phono stage. Clearly not.


But because I mistook what is better for better for me.


Same record. Same flaws.


But now they sat inside the music instead of on top of it.


The midrange filled the room. The soundstage opened up. And the song my mother used to play, the one I'd come back to a hundred times, was a song again, not a forensic report.


And that was the moment.


That was the lesson.


This is what I want every audiophile watching this video to hear.


Because I almost didn't.


The new gear is real.


The Accuphase C57, by all the objective standards, is a better phono stage than the Allnic H7000V. It has a lower noise floor. It is quieter. It is better in channel separation. And it is a resolution monster. Very high resolution from top to bottom.


The upgrades brought to the table by new gear are genuinely real.


And I'll tell you with a straight face that someone in a different system, with a different collection and a different relationship with their music, should buy the Accuphase C57 ten out of ten times.


But what is new and better isn't always the same thing as what is right for you and your system.


And I feel like every audiophile eventually runs into this problem, where they find a piece of gear that's new, that measures better, that has better specs, and on paper should be much better than what they currently own.


As audiophiles, we chase resolution. We chase transparency and what is the next best thing on that spec sheet.


But sometimes we forget what matters most.


And that fifteen thousand dollars that I almost spent wasn't going to make my system better. It would make my favorite records sound worse.


And that's not an upgrade.


We sometimes forget that the entire reason we got into this hobby in the first place was because of how a piece of music made us feel, not how cleanly we bought it.


The records that matter to me most aren't the audiophile pressings. It is the family pressings, the music that connects me to the people I've loved.


And a piece of gear, whether it be a phono stage, integrated amplifier, amplifier, or speakers, that makes those recordings sound worse, even if it makes the audiophile pressings sound awesome, isn't necessarily an upgrade for me.


So that's the trap.


You will run into it eventually.


It might not be a phono stage. It might be a DAC, a streamer, an amplifier, or speakers, or any other component really.


But you will run into it eventually, where you feel like what you have now is a compromise all of a sudden because this new thing is better on the spec sheet.


Something new and shiny that makes you feel and has you convinced that it is definitely better than what you have now.


And you might be tempted to spend a lot of money to chase that instead of asking the really important question, and the only one that really matters:


Does this piece of equipment make me want to listen more?


And if you already have that, then be careful before you trade it in.


So the Accuphase C57 is going back to Peter with genuine respect. It is a magnificent piece of engineering, and someone is going to be very lucky to own it.


And the Allnic stays. Not because it's a better phono stage, but because it's a better phono stage for me, for my collection, and for my system.


I think I'm definitely still a tube guy when it comes to phono stages.

 

[Håkon_Rognlien]

kom på at jeg adresserte eksakt dette problemet tilbake i 2019 her på HFS:

Diverse - Et oppgjør med virkeligheten!

Jeg har gjennom årene, og ,ikke minst i den senere tid, tatt noen debatter med forholdet mellom de målbare realiteter og den hørbare virkeligheten, og jeg føler nå at det er på høy tid å ta bladet fra munnen. Beklager til dere som baserer deres hifi-liv på målinger alene, for dette blir ikke...

www.hifisentralen.no

Ble en lang tråd og mye harde fronter, ja.

 

[The Shy]

kom på at jeg adresserte eksakt dette problemet tilbake i 2019 her på HFS:

Diverse - Et oppgjør med virkeligheten!

Jeg har gjennom årene, og ,ikke minst i den senere tid, tatt noen debatter med forholdet mellom de målbare realiteter og den hørbare virkeligheten, og jeg føler nå at det er på høy tid å ta bladet fra munnen. Beklager til dere som baserer deres hifi-liv på målinger alene, for dette blir ikke...

www.hifisentralen.no

Ble en lang tråd og mye harde fronter, ja.

Det er jo ikke så rart når en blir fortalt at en fantaserer eller har tette ører