March 2023

Pigeonholing Is Still Going On
We remain passionate about all things audio.
Editorial By Alan Sircom

  It's strange. While a lot of audio is truly universal in its approach, there is still a lot of pigeonholing going on. Somewhere along the way, it's easy to fall into the trap where you think one country has some kind of exclusive hold over what is and isn't good in audio. Often, but not always exclusively, that just happens to be your home turf.

This is (hopefully) not simple xenophobia at work. While the mechanics of our listening mechanisms remain unchanged from country to country, we often grow up in very different musical environments and that can reflect in the audio we choose. That even holds across the years; recent studies suggest those who grew up with heavily compressed music from the 'loudness war' era are struggling to come to terms with the more realistic, less compressed sound of acoustic instruments and voices without auto-tune. But I think we can overstate the case for locally-tuned audio equipment.

With many years of listening to good audio at all levels and all shapes and sizes under my belt, I think there's more convergence than divergence now. Yes, there are distinct 'flavours' of good audio common to some countries, but some of these are based more in years of meeting the demands of clientele in their respective homelands than differences in hearing.

We reflect both those differences and similarities. Both hi-fi+ and our sister title The Absolute Sound are dedicated to the common goal of outstanding audio, but we approach that goal in different ways for different readers. It's a recognition that those who are buying high-performance equipment designed for personal audio or smaller, metropolitan listening rooms are not doing so under some kind of duress, and are not some form of second-class high-ender next to those who have the sheer real estate to pursue larger systems.

There is always some crossover, but in the last year or so, we have actively pursued different products to suit those stances, and will continue to do so. We remain passionate about all things audio, but hi-fi+ is committed to getting the best sound from the sort of smaller listening rooms that city-dwellers of the world use daily. This is not about price or compromise; increasingly, there are high-performance systems designed specifically to achieve this goal irrespective of cost. 

Congratulations!: hi-fi+ is pleased to announce that our recent Dynaudio EMIT 20 competition has been won by Callum Bolton, from Manchester in the UK. Well done and we hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Errata: hi-fi+ published a review of the excellent Gold Note System in issue 216. However, the A6 EVO II loudspeaker was inadvertently written incorrectly as A6 EVO 11. Our apologies for the confusion this may have caused.

Alan Sircom, Editor hi-fi+