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Greetings fellow music lovers. This week Acoustic Sciences President and TubeTrap inventor Art Noxon, PE speaks on the state of modern Hifi.

What’s Going On?

…Nothing much, except it’s a new generation of people who are discovering it… It started in NYC in the early 50’s and kind of died out in the 90’s because of computers, home theater, downloads and earbuds.

Nowadays, people are rediscovering HiFi, the adventure and delight it brings. Unlike trying to listen while awash in a cacophony of distracting sights and sounds, typical to the home theater and earbud crowd, the audiophiles of today are finding again the nearly lost experience and pleasures of hearing pure sound. And the audio dealers of today find themselves remodeling once again, converting one of their home theater showrooms back into a high-performance listening room.

HiFi originally was about recreating great sounding music. Over the years, around the mid 80’s HiFi evolved into something much more, much bigger, almost unbelievable. Until someone actually hears the state of the art, it’s pretty hard to talk to them about it. HiFi today is not about hearing quality music, high DSP music on earbuds…it’s much more. In addition to the replication of music, today’s systems deliver a sonic Sound Stage.

And just like a visual stage, there is a sound stage, we hear it but at the same time we actually see it. This idea of sonic vision comes from the leakage between our seeing nervous system and our hearing nervous system. Some people have more sonic vision, leakage, than others. It’s called Synethesia and it has been around forever. It actually includes the leakage of stimulus between all of the senses.

We listen, we quiet all our other senses, including and most importantly our visual sensory input. We stare, trancelike. Once our visual distractions disappear we begin to see sound. HiFi is usually mic’d to record sounds that are coming from somewhere, going by, heading elsewhere. In a good HiFi setup, and when we are free from visual simulations, we not only hear but we begin to see a sonic version of the original sound stage…

Finish reading the last half of Art’s entire article