During a recent British Airways flight I read the following article which maybe of interest to members
Jonathan Margolis on his lifelong pursuit of the perfect hi-fj
This is 98 per cent a man thing, I suspect, but it's truly disturbing, and most of what follows has happened to me. OK, you've splashed out two or three grand on a name hi-fi, the kind of thing that you'll see advertised in glossy magazines and for sale in big department stores. This is, you think, a lot to spend on a glorified gramophone, but you feel that you have at last elevated yourself above the hordes with their high street stereos. You take it home and you love it.
But just a few weeks later, you see your brand, which you thought was unimpeachably upmarket, referred to somewhere as mid-market, commercial rubbish. And the sound, well -it's OK for 'the kind of people who like that kind of thing'. Bruised, you listen to your prized system again and, without feeling very secure in this judgement, decide that you're no longer happy.
A year or so later, you can't stand the thing any more and go to a serious hi-fi shop, where they snigger at you. They explain that what you really need is a system in which the CD player, the amplifier and the speakers are all made by different, little known manufacturers. This 'high end' system, they tell you, which will cost maybe four thousand pounds, maybe five or six, may look a mess, but you'll be hearing the real thing.
Your high-end system is then the pride of your life, until the whole thing unravels again in exactly the same way. In my case, it happened when a manufacturer sent me a pair of speaker cables costing £600 to review. When my local hi-fi specialist set up a comparative test so that I could review them fairly, I could damned well tell the difference, or at least thought I could. And when I told them what system I was using, they laughed, "Oh, you're not going to be able to tell the difference with that kind of equipment," they said. And proceeded to sell me the virtues of another brand, which would cost around £12,000.
A few weeks later, I mentioned this brand to a hi-fi buff, who hooted with laughter. "Those are just made for flash my boys with cloth ears:' he said. "We'll lend you our latest system, so you can really hear hi-fi at last."
Soon, a £25,000 hi-fi with £10,000 speakers, all by suitably exotic UK manufacturers, was staying with us for the month. It sounded wonderful. a glorious wall of refined noise. It was well outside my price bracket but at least now, I felt, I appreciated what high end is all about.
Until, that is, I had lunch with Ricardo Franassovici, owner of an importer of top-end hi-fi called Absolute Sounds in south London. High-street stereo, your typical up-to-£500 system, he said, actually hurts his ears. The kind of big brands I started out with, for him, "are electronic components without soul". The £25,000 system I'd had, he didn't so much dismiss as damn with faint praise.
So what would be his ultimate, perfect hi-fi? It turned out to be composed of two brands. "I would have the CD and amplification by Krell and speakers by Wilson Audio:' he said without much hesitation. "If you hear equipment of that quality, it will not be like having the performer in your room, but you will feel you are in his room, and that is the difference." The cost of such a system? From £40,000 up to, maybe, £250,000, maybe more. It's back to Comet for me in future, I think