Hifi Pig

Flogging A Dead Horse – Do People Really Care About Great Sound?

I was watching Top of the Pops the other night, the repeats from 1977. Ten-year-old me would have been glued to them back then, sitting goggle-eyed in front of the idiotbox, probably eating something filled with sugar and artificial colours, and marvelling at the idea that music could come through the telly at all – which reminds me of the first time I saw a fax machine, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, there I was, forty-odd years later, watching ABBA perform The Name of the Game, and the audio was –  how can I put this politely? –  absolute shite. Not just a bit off. Not a “well, that’s the seventies for you” sort of thing. No, this was properly bad. As in: “Was this recorded onto a piece of wire they found behind the studio, or on one of Janine’s wax cylinders I mentioned last week”? bad.

It wasn’t just ABBA either; I don’t mind a bit of ABBA and went to see the Supertrooper film a couple of times when it came out. Darts were on before them, doing what Darts do (acapella gubbins), and some completely forgettable singer afterwards launched into a medley of something or other that made me question whether punk ever happened at all. And before anyone corrects me, yes, punk had happened by 1977, but you’d never have known it from Top of the Pops. On that particular week, at least, you’d have thought the Sex Pistols had been outlawed by Queenie and replaced by nice shiny entertainers in trousers with suspiciously sharp creases and impossibly tight crotches.

But the thing that really struck me wasn’t the fashion or the hair or the choreographed jigging about. It was the sound. It was REALLY awful.

And yet, and here’s the interesting bit, if you’d taken a poll of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people watching that show at the time, I don’t think many would have cared. They’d have been singing along, tapping their feet, maybe recording it on a cassette labelled “TOP OF THE POPS – DO NOT TAPE OVER”, and that would have been that. To be fair, the original broadcast probably sounded half-decent (though probably not through the Redifusion telly we had), but this recording was really poor.

Meanwhile, the audiophile in me was sitting there thinking, Good grief (I actually used several expletives), how did we put up with this?

And then it hit me.

Most people don’t care about sound quality. They never have. And we, the audiophiles, the HiFi nerds, the obsessives who rearrange furniture or fill our living spaces with panels and traps for better bass response and spend absurd amounts of time debating whether a DAC sounds more “natural” when lifted 3cm off the rack on balls made of unobtanium, are a relatively small tribe of folk hoping, perhaps in vain, that one day the world will join us.

And the reality is that the rest of the world really doesn’t give a monkey’s toss.

But is that a problem? Is it something we should be moaning about? Or do we cling to the idea that, one day, people will wake up, stretch, yawn, carry out their daily ablutions and suddenly care passionately about dynamic range and noise floor?

Let’s explore that in a bit more nerdy audiophile detail, shall we? We’re among friends, aren’t we? Aren’t we?

This is something that took me far too long to accept: most people simply want the tune. They want the feeling of music, not the fidelity of it. They want the emotional hit, the nostalgia, the singalong moment, the shared memory, the warm blanket of something they know and love. Some of my most memorable musical moments have been enjoyed in the car on a crappy car stereo.

These people don’t need the hi-hat to shimmer with just the right amount of sparkle. They don’t require the bass to be tight, controlled, and fast. They don’t lose sleep over whether the midrange has a slight veil or whether the stereo image collapses if a gnat’s nether regions intrude on the listening space.

To them, The Name of the Game is The Name of the Game, regardless of whether it’s played through a 1977 television speaker or a £20,000 system.

In fact, if you gave half the country a choice between ABBA on a transistor radio, or ABAND they don’t like on a high-end system, most would choose ABBA without hesitation. And when you think about it, that’s perfectly reasonable, and it might just be us lot who are a bit weird.

I genuinely believe HiFi enriches my life. It makes music bigger, more moving, more immersive. It can turn a song I’ve heard a thousand times into something brand new. It can make me sit up, grin, cry, laugh, or (occasionally)  jump out of my seat because a track I thought I knew suddenly has another layer; we’ve all had that moment when listening to new kit and something new in a track jumps out because we are listening so intently…or the new kit is so much better than the last.

But that doesn’t mean everyone needs or even wants that.

The average person doesn’t buy a car based on its 0–60 time. They buy the one that gets them from A to B, looks alright, and doesn’t explode. Likewise, most people just want music that plays when they press play. We, on the other hand, are the equivalent of the people who read tyre compound reviews “for fun”. And that’s cool. Every hobby has its nerds. We’re just the audio version.

Look, the fidelity of broadcasts like Top of the Pops was probably always objectively terrible. The equipment was limited, the tapes degraded (I actually think this was the issue with the episode I was watching), and half the time the performances were mimed anyway.

But most people didn’t (and still don’t) fuss about fidelity. They were too busy enjoying themselves. They were discovering new music, dancing in living rooms, talking about bands the next day at school or work, buying singles, and feeling connected to something.

Perhaps we’ve lost some of that collective enthusiasm. Music consumption seems more private now. Loads of folk prefer headphones instead of shared speakers. They make playlists instead of record collections or mix tapes. They enjoy background listening instead of focused listening.

We’ve gained convenience and lost ritual. We gained choice, and lost involvement (in so many things in life). We gained fidelity, and lost… something else that I can’t quite put my finger on.

Perhaps we are flogging a recently deceased equine. Sometimes I do wonder if we, as an industry, a hobby, a community, are flogging a slightly disinterested, mildly confused horse.

We talk about fidelity as if it’s the One True Path. We evangelise. We demonstrate. We write articles. We host shows. We debate things so microscopic they’d probably not be spotted by an electron microscope.

And still, most people will happily listen to music through laptop speakers, Bluetooth earbuds shaped like vitamin capsules, TV soundbars that sound less than adequate…and they’re happy.

So are we flogging a dead horse? No, I don’t think we are. But we’re definitely flogging a horse that isn’t that interested in getting up and would prefer to be left well alone.

But here’s the thing. Despite everything I’ve said, despite the fact that most people don’t care about fidelity, despite the awful Top of the Pops audio, and despite decades of being a niche within a niche…people still love music! They love it passionately. Fiercely. Wholeheartedly. And that means there is always room to grow the hobby.

Some people discover HiFi by accident. Some through nostalgia. Some through curiosity.
Some because they finally hear a track on a decent system and go, “Oh. Oh wow. I didn’t know it could sound like that.” Most never will. But some will. And that’s enough.

We don’t need everyone to join the party – do we even want everyone to join our exclusive little club?. We just need the people who hear that difference and get it.

The world won’t suddenly wake up and care about sonic reproduction, but the ones who do are our people. And there will always be some.

Watching ABBA and Darts on Top of the Pops reminded me of something important: People don’t care about fidelity, but they do care about connection. If the connection is strong, fidelity is optional, and if the connection is weak, fidelity won’t save it.

The audio was dreadful. The performances were “of their time”. The production values suggested punk had been politely asked to wait outside. But hundreds of thousands of people loved it. And that matters.

As for us audiophiles, we’ll continue doing what we do: buying gear we probably don’t need, arguing about formats, moving speakers millimetre by millimetre, convincing ourselves we’ve “finally reached the endgame” (we haven’t and never will), and always, always chasing that feeling when the music just clicks that part of our pleasure receptors that gives us a little tingle of joy.

And maybe the next person who wanders into our listening room, or hears a system at a show, or reads one of my Sunday Thoughts pieces, will hear something that makes them say: “I didn’t know it could sound like this.” And if that happens,  the horse is not dead at all. It’s just waiting for the right song to give it some giddy-up.

Stuart Smith

Read More Sunday Thoughts.

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