Hi-Fi's Ultimate Flaw

Roger Skoff finally reveals all.

For most of a century—even before some early genius coined the term "high fidelity"—audiophiles, music lovers, and HiFi Crazies have been working to create the ultimate system for sound reproduction. In the course of their efforts, an amazing number of approaches have been tried, and an amazing number of skills and technologies have been created, developed, and ultimately recognized as "steps along the way," but never the actual sonic nirvana hoped for.

Although encouraging outcomes have resulted, none has ever been accepted by everyone as even the best avenue for exploration. People of different tastes, preferences, and predilections have created an ongoing flood of controversy over which—of almost anything—is best. We now have ongoing wars (at least of words) over tubes versus solid state; analog versus digital; over whether cables actually affect performance; whether horn, box, or panel speakers are superior; and—still in the speaker realm—whether open‑back enclosures are a revelation or (as physics declares they must be) a bass‑canceling travesty. As the old saying goes, "Opinions are like (navels)—everybody's got one," and in HiFi, even without conscious recognition of Orwell's idea of "doublethink," they may even have two or three.

In search of the ultimate reality, scientists, audiophiles, and independent researchers have developed innumerable theories and hypotheses, and done a tremendous amount of testing of every kind: open, blind, double‑blind, and undoubtedly even cross‑eyed, if such a protocol exists. But—like the Unified Field Theory—no one has ever come up with a single solution that explains, for every application, the mystery of sound.

Perhaps the best place to start learning about sound is where it's made: the concert hall, the recording studio, or the location‑recording venue. There, one or more—or even as many as a thousand people (as for one spectacular Los Angeles performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 8)—come together and, by vibrating their vocal cords; banging on percussion instruments; plucking or hammering on strings; using stretched horsehair to vibrate other strings (all of which are attached to boxes of various shapes and sizes); or by blowing through or across brass or wooden tubes, they get the air around them to rhythmically vibrate. Then, a number of pressure‑sensing devices placed strategically among all those vibrating things and people pick up some of those vibrations and turn them into electricity, the pattern of which—its changing voltages and amperages and the timing of them—is recorded in one or more of several ways and later used as a template to drive air pumps that will seek to recreate the vibrations of the original event.

There are inefficiencies, of course. Air, like any other physical medium, is subject to inertia and may not, with total accuracy, pick up the vibrations made by all the various people and instruments. Similarly, the pressure sensors (they call them microphones) scattered around the venue all use a physical diaphragm that, like the air, is subject to inertia and cannot, therefore, ever be relied upon to convert the vibrations to electricity with total accuracy. And, all else notwithstanding, there's also the problem of multiple sources: With many sources of vibration—each producing a different, complex combination of frequencies—combined with reflected energy from the surrounding walls, floor, and ceiling, and even the vibrating bodies themselves, it's not merely possible but certain that different patterns of vibration, from different sources, both original and reflected, and of the same or nearly the same amplitude, will, after traveling different distances, arrive out of phase at one or more of the sensors at the same time. This can effectively cancel them out or create new heterodyne frequencies and, whether by loss or addition, prevent the effective capture and conversion of all the vibrational energy.

All of these factors must inevitably lead us to understand that the recorded templates (the "recordings") can never truly represent the original vibration patterns. And when we further consider that—even disregarding completely the possibility of distortion or inaccuracy in the electronic recording and playback of those patterns—the air pumps that must turn them back into patterns of vibration in the air are themselves physical systems involving the movement of physical diaphragms (effectively the opposite of those of the microphones). They, too, are subject to inertia and therefore to further inaccuracy. In the end, we have no choice but to recognize that absolute, or even near‑absolute, accuracy in recreating the original patterns of vibration is simply impossible.

Even so, that's not the real problem. The real reason why—try as we might, spend what we spend—we can never perfectly recreate the sound of anything at all is that audiophiles, music lovers, HiFi Crazies, and all the rest of us fail to recognize that what we think we hear is not "sound" (as we, despite all rational explanation, still insist on calling it) but simply a pattern of vibrations—initiated as vibrations; recorded as vibrations; reproduced as vibrations; picked-up by our ears as vibrations; and transmuted to "sound" only in our minds, by our minds.

Except as the product of our own minds, sound is a complete fantasy; a hallucination—just one more example of HiFi voodoo.

Since becoming aware of this, not only I, but others, including an independent test laboratory have measured every aspect of the process – from the creation of the original vibrations by the instruments or the people "singing", all the way through the recording and playback process; to finally placing sensors in the ears of a panel including not just ordinary people, but also degree'd experts such as engineers and physicists, and not one of our measurements ever showed anything at all other than patterns of vibration taking the form, in air, of small variations in pressure, and, during the electronic stages of the process, of equally small variations in voltage and current, all entirely consistent with Ohm's Law and the findings of the AES.

Forget all of our past discussions over the relative merits of tubes and solid-state; forget whether cables, cable lifters, room-treatments, power conditioners, and other hotly-disputed "tweaks" work; forget it all: It's all the result of years of misunderstanding. HiFi's ultimate flaw is that:

There is no sound. There is only vibration. Our measurements have proven it.