September 2024

The Critics' Choice Awards
What may be an award-winning article....
Article By Roger Skoff

  As you already know, besides writing these articles, I also design and manufacture a line of high-performance audio cables. It's actually my second cable line, the first having been sold long ago to a Canadian company after many years of success and the earning of many awards from around the world.

Editor's Note: With this issue being our annual Blue Note Awards, we felt having the 'other side' of the industry share their feelings concerning awards. Do awards really matter? Do readers take extra special interest in award-earning products? Is the bottom line that we should just use our ears and find what best combo of gear that allows us to best enjoy our favorite music?

As you can imagine, I'm very pleased and proud about all of the awards earned by both companies, but I also know that, while each of those awards represents the positive opinion of one or more reviewers or even the consensus of a whole panel of recognized audio experts, the only real expert for any given product or system is the person who – after personally hearing it perform in his system, within his listening room, playing his own choice of music, either likes it or not.

To explain this, let me tell you about a purely unplanned and coincidental conversation I had about hi-fi just yesterday with someone who doesn't think he's an audiophile, but who's interested and would like to become one.

We had never spoken before, but it turned out that we had a mutual friend, who had told him about me and what I do, and he (the person I was talking with) said that he had heard from our friend that I make cables, and asked me if the cables I make could make his system sound better. Before I could answer that, I told him, I would need to know a little about him, about his musical tastes, whether or not he already had a system, and, if so, what it consisted of and how it was set up.

He responded that he has McIntosh electronics, Klipsch Cornwall speakers, and cables that his dealer sold him, but that he doesn't know what they are. As to the room placement, he told me that normally, his speakers are placed against the back wall of his asymmetrical listening room, but that, when his wife isn't around and he can listen privately, he moves the speakers forward and to where they sound best. The music he listens to, he said, is mostly either Rock or Blues, and, when he can, he likes to play it really loud.

So what did I tell him?

Just like everything else in life, no cable is perfect, or ever will be. Anything at all that involves moving a signal from place to place (as from component to component or from amplifier to speakers) will do something to change the signal. Even just running DC (as from a battery) through a wire from one point to another will change it: Some tiny but real part of it will be lost as heat due to the resistance of the wire it's passing through. When two wires are involved, as in any cable, capacitance, and inductance are added to the mix and make their own changes, and when the wires are insulated (as at least one of them must be to prevent the wires from "shorting" against each other) multiple other factors are brought into play, all of which WILL affect the signal.

Every aspect of a high fidelity music reproduction system is not "does it make a difference", but "will the difference it makes be noticed?" and, if you do notice it, will you like it?

That's it.

That's, essentially, all of high-fidelity sound reproduction in a nutshell.

Everything makes a difference, but sometimes you simply aren't able to hear it. That might be because the difference is so small that your ears can't pick it up. Or maybe it's masked by something else that's louder or that does a better job of commanding your attention. Or it might be that the system could produce it and, if it did, you'd notice it, but that particular sound or characteristic is simply not there in the bit of music you're listening to. A tuba quartet, for example, isn't going to give you a whole lot of information about how well the system plays the sound of either a triangle or a bass drum.

And even if the differentiating sound is there and obvious, upon first listen you still might not notice it because it's not among the things you listen for. Women, for example, are much more likely to listen to the words of a song than men are, and men are more likely to notice the system's imaging and soundstaging capabilities. Plus, different people simply like things differently. What's crucial to one person may go utterly unnoticed by another, and each of us has his personal hierarchy of sonic or musical qualities and characteristics that he listens for or listens to in evaluating the sound of a system – or in enjoying the music.

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Best upgrade to date say reviewers!

We have a sense of humor here at Enjoy the Music.com.

Enjoyment is another real factor, too. We all have personal favorite kinds of music and those are the ones that we will seek out to listen to. What may be less obvious is that we each also have our preferred kind of sound, and that's what we ought to build our systems to deliver.

Audiophiles like to think that what we are striving to achieve in our listening room is a realistic reproduction of a live musical event. I certainly do. I want to have my system make me feel like I'm right there in the concert hall, hearing it exactly as I would there. The problem, of course, is that that's impossible. Too many factors in the recording and playback process; in the equipment we listen to; and in the acoustics of the room that we listen in, make achieving musical reality an impossible dream.

But, with careful effort and surprisingly little money, we can certainly achieve the kind of sound that we like!

And that's where I finally got around to telling that guy I was talking to what I thought my cables could do for his system. I think the average audiophile is right: If you ask him what a cable is supposed to do, he'll probably tell you that it's not supposed to do anything at all – just to get the sound from one place to another without distorting it, adding or subtracting anything, or otherwise changing it in any way. I agree with that, and in designing and building cables, I always try to get them to do as nothing as possible, while always understanding that that's a goal that can never actually be achieved.

That's why what I said to him was that if what he likes to hear from his system is just the sound of his recordings, played on his components, through his speakers, in his home's listening room, with as little interference as possible from its cables, he'd probably like my cables better than some others, not because they make anything sound better by improving it, but because, as the critics and reviewers have said, they do good "nothing" and make nothing worse.

That's not the same with some other elements of people's home music systems. Classic tube electronics were known to regularly have as much as 2% distortion (a figure that modern solid-state electronics designers would be horrified by) but because the distortion produced by tubes tends to be even-order (second harmonic, fourth harmonic, etc.) and because people tend to find even order harmonics pleasing (musical instruments are machines designed to add even order harmonics to a fundamental tone) a great many people find classic tube electronics to be "musical" and more satisfying because of their high distortion levels.

It's the same with speakers, which always have a higher level of distortion and frequency inaccuracy than any of a system's electronic components. Speaker design involves far more than just finding or making good drivers and putting them together to make music. Cabinet sizes, shapes, and resonances can affect the sound, or designers can purposely add a dip or a bump to their frequency response or use a particular kind of crossover arrangement to "voice" the speaker to have a more "musical" or more "analytical" sound, or even, by putting a peak in the right frequency range, to make them sound as if they image and soundstage better than they really do. To a very great degree, speakers aren't just technology; people have to like them if they are to be successful.

Speakers also have to interface with the room that they have to perform in and with the equipment that driving them, and, all in all, getting it "right" is more than just a matter of picking stuff, buying it, getting it home, and plugging it in.

And no, it's not just you: the reviewers you may look to for help in making your selections or in judging possible new purchases have exactly the same problems. They also have a system with its own characteristics, and are playing it in their personal listening room(s), using their favorite music to judge the sound by. And, just like you, they have things that they like and things that they don't like, and their own ideas of what music ought to sound like and what to listen for in judging a system producing it.

So, what does that all mean? And how does it affect you? Easy. Nobody can possibly hear everything that's on the market trying to earn their purchase dollars.

Nobody.

Not even the reviewers.

But if you've followed a reviewer for a while and you know that his system is good and his choice of things to listen to is close enough to your own to be worthwhile – or even if he writes for a publication (like this one) where you know that you can find reviews that are well-written, truthful, and that come to the same kinds of conclusions that you think you might if you were the reviewer, then reviewers can serve you in several valuable ways: They can tell you about products that you might otherwise never hear of. They can, by their description of what they hear and how they respond to it, let you know about new things that are worth hearing for yourself, or help you to "rule out" things that aren't.

And that's where awards come in. The three things you can be sure of with a reviewer or a publication that you trust are: They will have heard and evaluated a broad selection of products before making any award decisions. All of those products will have been pre-selected for review because somebody (or a lot of people) said that they were good. They will have brought years of critical listening experience to making their final judgment, and they're not going to risk their reputation by praising or giving an award to a product that they – or even a carefully selected review panel – don't believe to deserve it.

Consider reviewers to be a sort of private auditioning service. If, by what you read of their work, they can earn your trust and confidence, and make you feel like you and they would both come to pretty much the same conclusions about what they write about, they can help to point you in the right direction or keep you from taking off in a wrong one. Awards are the same thing: If I see that a product has earned an award from a writer or a publication that I trust and believe to have tastes and preferences similar to my own, I'll put the award winners on my "to check out" list.

And then, if they're products I'm interested in, I'll find a way to audition them either at a dealer's store, a friend's house, or preferably in my own home on my high-performance audio system... playing my favorite recordings to see if the reviewers got it right... as we both...

Enjoy the music!

 

  Roger Skoff