Hi-fi is an interest, a hobby, and an obsession. But what is it about hi-fi that makes it all these things to us? I started thinking about this again after reading a magazine report on a hi-fi show. A journalist at the show had gone around asking people why they were into hi-fi, and almost everyone had answered by saying ‘I just like music’.
I was struck by how inadequate and even disingenuous that response was. Sure, it is correct in a trivial sense because hi-fi exists in order to convey music to listeners; and obviously, no-one who likes hi-fi dislikes music. But is liking music the same thing as liking hi-fi, and does the latter necessarily follow from the former? How many times have you started talking to someone and found that you share a love not only of music in general, but also of certain styles, genres, and individual artists? And how many times have you asked the inexorable next question ‘how do you listen to music?’ and been disappointed by an answer that reveals neither appreciation, nor even any real awareness, of hi-fi?
In fact, most music lovers do not appear to be interested in hi-fi much or at all. This was emphatically brought home to me recently. A friend of mine loves country music, and she has heard a little of one of my current favourites, the Decemberists, an alt-folk outfit from Portland. I thought I’d give her a treat, and introduce her to hi-fi, by playing the final song from the Decemberists’ 2009 concept album ‘The Hazards of Love’. This very moving song is about a double suicide by a pair of star-crossed lovers, and it has a country-music feel including a long, lugubrious slide-guitar solo. I had played the song using various turntable-arm-cartridge combinations earlier that day and I ended up especially enjoying it through my Garrard 401 turntable with its 12” Wand tonearm and Decca London cartridge. That evening I played the song to my friend and she was blown away by it. But her effusive praise pertained only to the song itself and its emotional impact; there was no mention of sound quality.
I initially regarded this as a win because I was able to tell myself that my equipment had done its job. I had in mind the hackneyed idea that when it’s performing properly, hi-fi gear allows you to forget that it’s there and to concentrate on the music, but I soon realised that I was falling back into I-just-like-music thinking. It then occurred to me that the synergy of the Decca-Wand-Garrard combination might have brought about an especially emotional musical experience. Yet although I, too, felt the emotional force of the song, I knew that I had been listening for other things as well: width and depth in the soundstage, a sense of space around individual instruments, musical coherence, and so on. These qualities do not necessarily militate against conveying emotion; if anything, they may well help. There is, however, no denying that, although we are both music lovers, my listening experience, shaped by decades of devotion to hi-fi, was different from my friend’s. And it even occurred to me that my playing the Decemberists’ song earlier on several different turntables, a form of behaviour so habitual that it seems entirely normal to me, would be incomprehensible to her. Then I thought of another friend, a fellow hi-fi enthusiast, who told me that his wife, listening from another room, complained that she always heard songs twice. This was, of course, because my hi-fi-enthusiast friend was continually trying out different equipment combinations.
In other words, there is more to liking hi-fi than just liking music. Or, to put it another way, while many people like music, some like music and hi-fi. In fact, the language of the pre-digital epoch was able succinctly to express this difference: in those days nearly everyone had a stereo, but only a few had hi-fi. The very term ‘hi-fi’ may therefore be understood as signifying something other than simply liking music. But how are we to account for this difference? And on a deeper level, why does an interest in hi-fi typically involve obsession and, frankly, addiction? Perhaps the ideas of certain philosophers might shed a little light on these hi-fi mysteries.
Arthur Schopenhauer thought reality consisted of two elements: representation and will. By representation he meant the world that our senses present to us. But, taking a cue from the early Greek philosopher Heraclitus, he also believed that beneath this seemingly stable world of appearances there was power, energy, and chaos. He summed up this unseen but dynamic realm with the concept of will. As a microcosm of this dualistic reality, an individual’s mind is also divided: there is ordinary consciousness, and there is the hidden but all-powerful will. Although Schopenhauer was writing in the early nineteenth century, his understanding of will is a striking anticipation of more modern psychological concepts such as the unconscious. According to both Schopenhauer and, more recently, Freud, most, if not all, of an individual’s predilections and choices are thus determined by irrational forces.
The classical Greek philosopher Plato thought that non-rational imperatives, which he associated with instinctual appetites, were in themselves boundless and (therefore) unsatisfiable. But while Plato felt that we can and should control our appetites by means of reason, and that this would not only be a good thing per se, but also lead to happiness, Schopenhauer thought the answer was in the arts. He believed that through art people might escape everyday experiences and glimpse a timeless reality beyond both appearances and the reach of will. And like many of his contemporaries associated with the Romantic movement, he thought that music was the highest of the arts. Friedrich Nietzsche, notably, a follower of Schopenhauer, wrote that the during the third act of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, he felt completely transported, losing all sense of time, space, and even his own existence.
In one sense, liking hi-fi may therefore be understood as an expression of non-rational forces. And the further – or deeper – one goes within hi-fi, the more apparent this becomes. I currently have six working turntables, all of which I listen to regularly, as well as several more in the pipeline being prepared or restored. This is not rational behaviour. One turntable would be enough if it were just a question of listening to music. Undoubtedly, non-rational determinants – Schopenhauer’s will, the unconscious, or Plato’s appetites – can direct you anywhere: as well as obsessively collecting turntables, someone might be drawn equally to, say, cars, motorcycles, or toy soldiers. (These are, of course, hypothetical examples, selected entirely at random!) But there is something special about music. And so, as a unique combination of non-rational determinants on the one hand, and the special aesthetic qualities of music on the other, there is something extra special, and extra appealing, about liking music and hi-fi.
I currently hear the siren’s call of another turntable. I see in my mind’s eye a restored vintage Commonwealth idler-drive with a Wand tonearm and a new moving-coil cartridge. It will be the best turntable I’ve ever owned, and I’ll never need or want another. Well, that might be the case if I just liked music. And if that were so, I might even start playing songs only once.
Dr Walter Kudrycz