The original headline for this article was going to be a bit more vanilla—something along the lines of “Needs vs. Wants in Hi-Fi.” It was inspired by two conversations: one between me and SoundStage! founder Doug Schneider, another with my buddy Steven Guttenberg, the Audiophiliac, whose YouTube channel boasts an impressive 255,000 subscribers as I write this.
On Steve’s Facebook page, he asked the sort of simple and thought-provoking question that always gets a good conversation going: “How many watts do we actually use with playing music very loud? I’d love to know! And if you can also use a SPL meter, how loud is loud, for you? Thanks!”
I was listening to Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled 1975 album when I read that post, so I cranked up the volume just a hair past my comfortable listening level, pulled out my SPL meter, and measured 93dB peaks (C-weighted), then checked the VU meters on my NAD C 3050 and found that it was cruising along at around 10Wpc RMS. So I commented as such.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what’s loud for one album is just sort of barely enough volume for another, so I loaded up some King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, cranked it, and texted Steve a video of my VU meters dancing up around the 20Wpc line. At which point he called me for a long overdue catch-up sesh.
The point of this, he told me, is that he’s working on a video about how powerful an amp one actually needs, and there’s some nuanced stuff about speaker sensitivity thrown in for good measure. I won’t spoil it, but I’m sure it’ll get a zillion views, and deservedly so. But I did push back against Steve’s suggestion that, with my speakers—Paradigm Studio 100 v.5 towers—I didn’t really need more than 20Wpc, all evidence to the contrary. I relayed my experiences with the Peachtree Audio Carina 300 I recently reviewed and its staggering 300Wpc output, which I definitely didn’t need but appreciated nonetheless.
“Yeah, I almost certainly didn’t push that thing past 20 watts for more than fractions of a second at a time,” I said, “but it was super nice knowing that I had ample headroom for something like the transients in the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus.” I also pointed out that, though I hadn’t seen Diego Estan’s measurements of the Carina 300 yet while we were chatting and might be proven wrong on this, experience led me to expect that THD+N would be significantly lower with the amp operating at closer to 20 to 50Wpc as compared to the 200 to 300Wpc it can crank out with ease. Having more power than I “need” means that I’m getting cleaner power at sane listening levels.
Then again, I said, my NAD C 3050’s 100Wpc of continuous power is also obviously more than I need with any speaker I own in any room of the house, much less my relatively mid-sized two-channel listening room. There’s something to be said for diminishing returns here, but that’s a whole other article for a whole other day.
You can’t stop the signal . . . or the noise
At any rate, I was recounting that conversation to Doug, and we got off on a long tangent about wants versus needs in hi-fi, in which he mentioned a little experiment that our aforementioned measurement specialist, Diego Estan, did to get a baseline for how much dynamic range he wants/needs in his own system. But since Doug couldn’t remember the particulars, I went straight to Diego for his own telling of the story. Here’s what he told me:
I was curious: What was the lowest-level signal (musical) I could hear in my room, when everything was quiet? (My room is in a basement, sound isolated, so quiet, but adjacent to HVAC, so I turned the furnace off.) I set the volume to a level where I would listen loud (about 100dB SPL C-weighted for peaks at listening position) with typical music. I then found files online of a music passage recorded at -70dBFS, -80, -90, etc., down to, I think, -120. The threshold where I could just barely make out the music was -100dBFS. So I concluded that my system and room, under ideal conditions, provide me with 100dB of dynamic range.
I have a very quiet room and a very quiet system (ear to tweeter to hear a very faint hiss). It was more to know if demanding a system yield 120dB or more of dynamic range made any sense. I determined no, unless you want to listen absurdly loud.
My own estimation of the same—how much dynamic range I can actually appreciate in my room—was reached somewhat less scientifically, but the conclusions are mostly the same. If my HVAC isn’t running, the background noise of my listening room is about 29dB. If the HVAC is running (and I live in Alabama, where winters in the low-20s Fahrenheit and summers in the upper-90s are the norm, so my HVAC runs more often than not), my noise floor is more along the lines of 32 to 34dB(C). And unless I’m seriously testing gear, peaks of 99dB are too much with most music. I’m the weirdo who refuses to eat in restaurants without ear protection, after all. So, at most, I realistically benefit from, what, 70dB of dynamic range?
Now, granted, if that’s all my system could deliver, I’d squawk. Any decent modern stereo setup running digital sources should positively trounce that, and if it didn’t, I would eviscerate it. But at what point do we move from “need” to “want” with all of this stuff?
Do we really need any of this stuff?
And that’s pretty much as far as my chain of thought had taken me with regard to this month’s editorial before I read Matt Bonaccio’s new piece for SoundStage! Hi-Fi, titled “In Defense of Doing Things the Wrong Way.” It’s a heck of a good read, and you should devour it all as soon as you’re done reading this rant, as he interviews some truly brilliant folks whose voices deserve to be heard.
But one line in particular really stood out to me:
Hi-fi is about entertainment. There is, factually, nothing about speakers or headphones or plastic discs that is necessary to sustaining life or the functioning of civil society. We do this stuff because we want to, and the impassioned cry of “I just couldn’t live without a good system!” that is common to all audio enthusiasts illustrates that we really, really want to.
That landed hard with me, because the truth of the matter is, while I’ve often said that I fell in love with music listening to an old mono clock radio with a three-inch speaker, even that was sort of a luxury when you think about it. I wouldn’t go so far as to call music itself a luxury, but the truth is that as long as I can find a group of people willing to make some joyful noise with me, I could just as well make my own music. And if you can’t, surely someone around you can.
Hi-fi is kinda kinky
The point is, though, it forced me to sort of reconsider my position on this whole wants-vs.-needs debate. And where I think I’ve arrived for now is that hi-fi fans really fit into two camps in this regard. For some of us, a great hi-fi setup is a kink. And for others, it’s a fetish.
What’s the difference, you ask? They’re both non-normative sexual interests, but sadly, we live in such a patriarchal world that “normative” just means heterosexual missionary sex, so anything outside of those confines is technically kinky.
Getting a little more authoritative, Merriam-Webster defines a kink as an “unconventional sexual taste or behavior.” Its entry for fetish tells a different story, though: “an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with complete sexual expression.” [Emphasis mine.]
Let’s be honest with ourselves here: These days, having a proper hi-fi setup is sadly non-normative, whereas it was absolutely mainstream when I was a kid. When I was, say, ten years of age, the question when visiting a new grown-up’s house wouldn’t be “I wonder if they have a stereo” but rather “I wonder how nice their stereo is!” So if you’ve got an amp and source devices and passive speakers set up in a proper stereo configuration, you’re not normal these days. Not at all.
Still, though, I talk to far too many audiophiles who are simply incapable of enjoying music if it’s not on their reference systems. When Brent and I had our aforementioned buddy Steve Guttenberg on an early episode of the SoundStage! Audiophile Podcast, Brent had to loan him some headphones that would connect to his phone. “I don’t own any,” he said. “It’s against my religion.”
I’m constantly being told by audiophiles that the Sonos speakers in my kitchen and bathroom aren’t fit for music consumption. “It’s not even music,” some old white dude once told me. (And as an old white dude myself, I’m allowed to say that.) But how the heck else am I supposed to listen to Buena Vista Social Club or Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava or Europe ’72, Vol. 9: Jahrhunderthalle, Frankfurt, West Germany while I’m sautéing the holy trinity of veggies for a batch of my famous shrimp creole? I’m legitimately convinced my cooking would suck if I tried doing it without music playing.
So, yeah. I need music of some form. I want to listen to prerecorded music that I love. And yes, I make no apologies for the fact that listening to my favorite albums on a stereo system that’s dialed in to the nines turns me on like nothing else. And the better the system, the more I enjoy what I refer to as the “special effects” of music reproduction: the soundstage, the imaging, the power of the lowest octaves, the tonal neutrality.
Truth is, though, if all of my gear disappeared tomorrow and I couldn’t replace it—if I really did have to listen to nothing better than a cheap Chi-fi amp or Sonos speakers or Apple HomePods or even my Bluetooth headphones, for goodness’ sake—I wouldn’t listen to music any less. I wouldn’t enjoy it any less. It wouldn’t move my soul any less meaningfully. Music would not be one ounce less a part of my life.
Because, again, hi-fi is a kink for me. It’s not necessary, but it surely heightens the experience in meaningful and perfectly healthy ways. And frankly, I kinda think I enjoy music more than the fetishists do. Which, in a way, means I think I love my hi-fi setup more than they love theirs, even though I don’t view it as an outright necessity.
So what is all of this for you? A kink? A fetish? Or are you merely hi-fi-curious?
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
