Failed Adventures in Hi-Fi

by Dan Watkins

For a number of years, I’ve found myself strangely fascinated by the world of what I affectionately refer to as audiophile nonsense. It’s an interest that I generally observe from a distance, though, as I frankly do not have the sort of income required to truly indulge in a hobby as expensive as hi-fi audio. Nonetheless, I enjoy flipping through catalogs of pricey audiophile equipment the way some guys do car magazines. I get a kick out of seeing the extravagant lengths some people are willing to go to make sure that Aja sounds just right in their dedicated listening chamber. It’s insane and ridiculous, but what if they’re onto something?

Growing up in the 90s, my first encounters with music were typically rudimentary: hissy cassette tapes played on the cheapest equipment available. Not long after that, my dad dusted off his old turntable, and my parents’ vinyl collection became a supplemental part of my listening routine. My family then boldly entered the digital age when we got our first CD player around 1992. We marveled at how those crackly old albums suddenly sounded crisp and clean. We had finally reached the pinnacle of audio technology.

As CDs became ubiquitous in the 90s, I followed suit in making them my default format for purchasing new music. I would also buy used records here and there sort of as a novelty and also because vinyl was still cheap at the time. At some point in the mid-2000s, I invested in a good-quality turntable and found that those old records actually did sound pretty good after all. I then started to gradually gear most of my album purchases toward vinyl. When I bought my turntable, I turned to various audio forums for tips on how to properly set it up, and I quickly found myself going down the rabbit hole of fussy audiophilia. There were all sorts of clever DIY tweaks and, of course, a neverending list of recommendations for expensive components guaranteed to magically make my ratty old copy of Aqualung sound like audio nirvana. For each upgrade, there were five more upgrades needed to really get the most out of it. If you buy a nicer stylus, then obviously, it’s time to upgrade your preamplifier, your speakers, etc. While listening to records, I started to find myself focusing more on the technical aspects of the stereo equipment more than just enjoying the music. Just a few years earlier, I was perfectly content plugging a halfway-decent pair of headphones into a CD boombox. How did I manage to get to this point? I eventually settled on a modest setup that was within my budget and sounded good to me, but there’s always that slightly nagging feeling of wondering what I’m missing out on.

My audio forum lurking would eventually lead me down another avenue of audiophile catnip: hi-res audio. For the uninitiated, hi-res audio is a digital format (sold either as digital downloads or on physical discs such as SACD and Blu-ray) that boasts a higher resolution and sampling rate than standard CDs. With the evolution of digital video formats from DVD to Blu-ray to 4K, it seems sensible that digital audio would also have room for improvement since the introduction of the compact disc in 1982, right? Out of curiosity, I purchased a used portable player capable of decoding hi-res files (Sorry, Neil Young. I did not buy a Pono.), and I downloaded a handful of albums to give it a try. The albums sounded… good? Better than a CD? Ehhh. What I found is that there’s a certain “good enough” threshold where I just can’t tell if I’m actually hearing a difference. It’s sort of like when I’m having an eye exam and the optometrist flips back and forth between two identical-looking lenses asking which is preferable. One might be statistically “better” than the other, but I sure can’t tell. 

As it turns out, the whole hi-res audio thing is fairly controversial among audio nerd circles. There are plenty of articles online arguing that the human ear is simply incapable of hearing a difference between CD and hi-res while avid audiophiles claim otherwise. These are similar to the debates that have been waging between analog purists and digital defenders for decades. I’ve decided that my ears just aren’t finely tuned enough to really take sides in either case. The good news is Amazon Music has recently added an HD tier to its streaming service, so you can feel free to give it a try for yourself without spending $25 to buy yet another copy of Abbey Road. Oh yeah, did I mention hi-res downloads are expensive? 

So what do I actually listen to these days? I primarily buy vinyl because, in all honesty, if I’m going to invest in a physical format, it might as well be the one that feels the most tactile and yes, looks cool on a shelf. Oh, and I suppose they sound pretty good too. On the other hand, I tend to do the bulk of my listening outside the house, in which case a high-quality mp3 is perfectly sufficient for my ears. Record labels have apparently caught on to this trend, and they have smartly taken a best-of-both-worlds approach of including digital downloads with vinyl. This pretty much has me covered. In the meantime, my hi-res player is sitting in a drawer patiently waiting for the day that I finally buy that $10,000 pair of headphones that will really let those hi-res files sing.