What Should I Listen For In A Good Hi-Fi System?

by James Leahy

The easiest analogy to draw is the example of being able to close your eyes when listening to your system and being able to hear the singer's voice right in front of your face like they were in the room with you. The beat of a drum should have the dynamics to make you jump of out your listening chair and at the same time you should be able to hear the smallest vibration in the singer's voice. The sound stage should pull you into the music and be as wide as the Mississippi River and have tremendous depth to it too so you can paint a picture in your mind in full Technicolor just as if you were there in real life. The vocals should go right through your body and be almost hardwired into your mind to totally envelop the listener without you having to concentrate.

You should become one with the music and forget you are listening to an electronic device. The singer's voice should create a precise image directly between your loudspeakers being solid and without vagueness. You also want your system to have enough headroom to able to hear the full dynamics of every piece of music you choose to play and throw you back in your listening chair when a drum solo is played. Selecting quality Hi-Fi equipment is not merely about going for the biggest price tag but selecting the 'right' combination that just works. I have heard systems that 'should' not have sounded so good as they did based solely on the individual components used. By the same token I have also heard some extraordinarily expensive big named systems sound embarrassingly poor. The reasons for both these cases is the system combination was wither will put together or it wasn't.

The measure of a truly great system comes from the less you have to do when listening. Some systems sound ok when listening to them for short periods but after 15 minutes you want to leave the room or turn the volume down because they become fatiguing on the ear. The ideal system should not be harsh or thin sounding but lush and warm with dynamics to burn. By this I mean you shouldn't have to have the brain power of a Pentium 4 processor to get a life like experience when you close your eyes and listen. The music from your system should be powerful enough to transport you out of your listening room and make you forget you are listening to a recording and make the walls seem like they have been knocked down. Like when you are listening to live music you do not have to concentrate at all, you can just relax because the music 'just is'. This should be the same experience you get in your home with your system. If this is not the case you have some work to do.