Written by Julien Pelchat Thursday, 26 February 2009 19:58

Looking at the big picture

Being an audiophile since the beginning of the 70’s, my quest for true music reproduction has always been a passion. From the beginning, I started to seek for sonically exciting musical work as well as experiment with a whole variety of audio equipment and devices. For loudspeakers, I have owned almost every type: from large horns to small mini-monitors including electrostatic and ribbon panels plus small to large electro-dynamic systems. I also owned many types of amplifiers: tubes, solid states, single-ended triodes and hybrids. Regarding sources, I followed the evolution of both, the analog and digital. In short, all the systems that I have owned had their strengths and weaknesses. As an example, a loudspeaker could be very dynamic while having a poor tonal balance and soundstaging capability and another loudspeaker could have a wonderful tonal balance but exhibit reduced dynamics. Sometimes loudspeakers were offering great sonic-imaging while lacking dynamic and timbre richness. At first, I was more impressed by the dynamic range than the overall coherence and tonal quality of a system. Soon enough though, the tonal rightness became of a prime importance.  Getting a perfect balance of all of these attributes is indeed an enormously difficult task.

Even though those years have brought me enjoyment, passion and constructive experiences, I must say that the new and innovative manufacturing technologies, the accessibility computer calculating power, the availability of high-tech materials, and the advancement of modern science have all contributed to the advancement of the high-end-audio industry. In other words, over the last years, the audio products got better to a point that we are more than ever getting closer to an ideal of sound coherence, dynamic range and tonality. For the most, this evolution happened in a progressive process that was barely noticeable. Such progress did not happen only for loudspeaker but for all audio products. Modern turntables became more accurate, most of the compact disk digital artifacts have been properly addressed, and power amplifiers have been made more accurate while offering an improved blend of musicality, transparency and reliability. In fact, I believe that the industry came a long way in making mostly everything superior. Because of the accuracy and revealing character of today’s components, the new challenge resides in matching and configuring the whole system to form a perfect balance.
 
This brings me to the following consideration: Audiophiles have always been passionate about “vintage” audio products, creating through the years, enthusiasm, passion and desire.  Some were unique enough to make them collectable pieces of engineering art.  However in terms of our actual advancements in the field of sound reproduction, we must admit that none of those can offer the level of accuracy or acoustic synergy (i.e. a perfect balance between tonal purity, dynamic range and transparency) of nowadays products.

The advancement of the audio industry is indeed far from stagnation and I foresee a great and exciting future full of memorable musical experience in the comfort of our homes.

Good listening everyone!