When hi-fi stops sounding like hi-fi

I've been doing a lot of listening lately. Multiple A/B comparisons of various products across a range of speakers and system configurations. It's made me think about something that perhaps sits beyond the usual audiophile vocabulary.

We tend to evaluate systems and components within them according to familiar parameters: resolution, detail retrieval, transparency, separation, soundstage, bass articulation, extension, texture, dynamics and so on. They're all important, and improvements in those areas can be impressive and have real value.

But I'm increasingly convinced that none of them, individually or collectively, necessarily guarantees the thing I'm ultimately looking for.

The illusion that a physical musical event is actually happening in the room.

That's something in the Luna Cables presentation that I keep coming back to: palpability, energy and physical presence.

A plucked guitar string is a particularly good example. You don't simply hear more or less information about the string. There's an immediacy to the event. The initial pluck, the body behind it, the release of energy into the room and the subsequent decay can be genuinely startling. When it's done right, by my measure, you get that involuntary physical reaction you might have if an instrument were actually played unexpectedly a few metres in front of you.

And I've started to think that this is quite different from resolution alone.

With a highly resolving system, we can hear extraordinary amounts of information: the texture of the string, the transient, harmonic structure, the body of the instrument, the recorded acoustic. We can mentally dissect the event and admire how much information is being reproduced.

But that's not how we experience live music.

When someone plucks a guitar in front of us, our brain doesn't catalogue the transient response, harmonic structure and soundstage position. All of those cues arrive together and are integrated almost instantaneously into something much simpler and more profound:

There's a guitar there.

That, for me, is where Luna can transcend some of the conventional audiophile parameters.

It's not necessarily about presenting each constituent element of the sound for inspection. It's about binding those elements into a convincing physical event. Attack, energy, tonal body, projection, ambience and decay arrive in a relationship that causes the brain, however momentarily, to stop analysing the reproduction and respond to something that feels real.

And perhaps that's why palpability is becoming such an important word for me.

Palpability isn't simply forwardness. It isn't brightness, extra detail or an exaggerated leading edge. At its best, it's the sensation that a reproduced instrument possesses physical substance and occupies space.

There's a presence to the sound that moves the experience from “I'm listening to a great hi-fi system” to “this feels real.”

A note doesn't merely emerge from the system. It seems to happen in the room, energise the space, with its decay continuing to float into the room before eventually disappearing back into it.

A presentation can potentially be more accomplished according to many conventional audiophile criteria and still not necessarily create a greater illusion of reality. Conversely, something that doesn't demand your attention with its technical abilities can sometimes achieve something arguably more difficult:

Suspension of disbelief.

The moment when you stop hearing tweeters, panels, cables, electronics or even “great sound”, and your auditory system briefly accepts the event in front of you as physically plausible.

I've come to think there are different forms of fidelity.

There's fidelity to information: how much of the recording can I hear?

There's fidelity to the acoustic: how convincingly are space, scale and decay reconstructed?

And then there's what I might call perceptual fidelity: does my brain believe what my ears are telling it?

Luna, in my system at least, has an unusual ability to get at that last one.

And perhaps the ultimate achievement of a high end system isn't hearing ever deeper into a recording.

Perhaps it's reaching the point where, every now and then, you forget there's a recording at all.

That's when hi-fi stops being an intellectual exercise in evaluating sound and becomes something much more visceral.

And when a plucked string can still make you jump, despite knowing perfectly well you're sitting in front of a stereo, that's worth paying attention to.