The focus and air lie


There always have been some kind of fashion in the way a system sounds and since a few years it seems that more and more people are looking for details, air and pinpoint focus / soundstaging.
There's a lot of components, accessories and speakers designed to fill full that demand... Halcro, dCS, Esoteric, Nordost, BW, GamuT are some examples.

This sound does NOT exist in real life, when you're at a concert the sound is full not airy, the soundstage exist of course but it's definitely not as focused as many of the systems you can hear in the hifi shops, it just fill the room.

To get that focus and air hifi components cheats, it's all in the meds and high meds, a bit less meds, a bit more high meds and you get the details, the air, the focus BUT you loose timbral accuracy, fullness.
It's evident for someone accustomed to unamplified concert that a lot of systems are lean and far from sounding real.

Those systems are also very picky about recordings : good recordings will be ok but everything else will be more difficult...
That's a shame because a hifi system should be able to trasmit music soul even on bad recording.
In 2008 this is a very rare quality.

So why does this happened ?

Did audiophiles stopped to listen unamplified music and lost contact with the real thing ?

Is it easier for shops to sell components that sounds so "detailled and impressive" during their 30mins or 1 hour demo ?
ndeslions
Walk outside your house at 3am and listen to the birds chirping. One is three feet away and the other is thirty feet away. Ten more are in between. How do you tell they are separated? What is between them? How many terms does it take?
sorry, one last effort to make clear what seems obvious: as with all art, the appreciation of music, any music, must have AT LEAST as much to do with the person listening (and all that "a person" entails, which is so so SO much more, including variable, than whether one has or has not heard a given level of fidelity), than the instruments or other machines (re)producing the sound waves that make up the music. any effort to refute this diminishes art via reductionism, scientism, and determinism.
i should add that such efforts not only diminish art, but NOT coincidentally (because the two are inextricably bound together), they also diminish (via the same reductionism, etc.) what it means to be human.
hi thomp9015:

your statement about the sociology of enjoying music is without merit. no one can get inside another's brain and heart, and generalizing to cultures , at best, is highly conjectural and without any shred of evidence.

the statement is divisive and does not advance communication between humans.

it is best to confine oneself to behavior and words and not try to interpret what we do not see.
What this discussion demonstrates is that there are a lot of ways to appreciate music and what is listened to in music depends on the listener. Resolving every detail will require different system specs than hearing the artists interpretation of a piece but lack of those resolving aspects will not prevent one from appreciating that interpretation. System accuracy is a high priority for some. Others prefer to listen to systems that themselves change the music and thus participate in the creation of art - hence the popularity of tube amps ( that statement is not intended as a negative judgment as to tube amps, but merely to be taken at face value).