Opinion

While hi-fi is always about trusting your own ears, Barry Willis is a firm believer that you should also trust scientific reasoning – particularly when looking for a quick system fix

Newcomers to the world of hi-fi are typically unaware of a continuing tolerance in some quarters for fringe-element hypotheses and mystical-magical inventions. Was it always this way? No doubt there were tall technological tales thrown around in the days of the gramophone, but it seems to be a more modern phenomenon.

Voyage of discovery

Perhaps it all started with the arrival of the Compact Disc in the early 1980s. CD was immediately an object of scorn among audiophiles baffled by its technological basis, perturbed by its lack of analogue artefacts, or who felt threatened by a new format demanding a revision of entrenched listening habits.

A slew of tweaks duly appeared, each offering some palliative for CD’s imperfections. One widespread fear was that playback was negatively affected by stray laser light bouncing around inside the spinning discs – a belief never proven in any reliable study, like pretty much all criticism of the format.

Some of you may remember that the cure for this contamination was painting the perimeter of each disc with a green marker, the idea being that a green rim negated the stray light and gave the sound of CDs a more pleasing character. Small speciality companies began selling green marking pens for silver disc owners to use on their collections. Some extended the metaphor and offered little green rubber mats for the label side of each disc, to eliminate light-induced listening fatigue.

Believers crowed about the green pen cure, but one British audio accessories brand bucked the trend by asserting that green was the wrong colour to deliver real benefits. It claimed that the proper colour was lavender, but then stunted its market potential by insisting that there was no need to coat the entire perimeter of each disc, but only a 90-degree arc.

If this sounds like lunacy, it’s a small part of a long story. Around the same time there was an American company which promoted a clock device (which looked like a normal alarm clock) that was claimed to have been subjected to ‘electron programming’ which harmonised the electrical field within a few metres, making music playback sessions all the more pleasant.

Even now you don’t have to search deep online to find products aimed at audiophiles making similar claims. Their advertising includes many glowing endorsements but no provable scientific reasoning.

Solid science

It seems to me that humans have a need to conflate fact with fiction, and a corresponding willingness to accept imaginary assertions as real. And in hi-fi, with its focus on the oblique concept of sound quality, this can be a problem.

This is why HFN’s hardware reviews combine subjective opinion with objective test and measurement. You can read what the reviewer thinks about a product, but also what we know about it. And often, it’s easy to see some correlation between the two.

The HFN Reference Listening Room [pictured above] isn’t a treatment-free place, of course. But there’s a massive difference between modelling an acoustic space from scratch, with designated acoustic treatments (diffusers, absorbers and bass traps) to linearise reverberation time and response, than colouring the perimeter of a CD green. There’s solid science behind the material construction of the room’s walls, floor and ceiling, too, plus the use of ‘audio-only’ ring mains and screened, under-floor cabling.

But ‘sound tuning’ measures like these come at a cost, so it’s easy to understand why ultra-affordable audio fixes became (and remain) popular. My advice? If it sounds too good to be true...