Information for High-End Beginners
This section of the site contains information for those who are interested in learning something basic about high-end audio. It contains, for example, an answer to the question, What Is High-End Audio? It also contains some suggestions about how one can begin one's involvement with this particular hobby; a guide to some of the lingo one hears used by audiophiles; and some discussion of the various pieces of an audio system.
Let me say straight-off that 'high-end' does not have to mean expensive. Although one can spend an enormous amount of money on a truly phenomenal system, high-end is more about attitude than it is about money: The goal is to get the best possible musical reproduction, given one's budget. It is more than possible to put together a musically satisfying system for less than one thousand dollars, and to do it with all new equipment. If one is prepared to buy some of one's equipment used, as I usually do nowadays, then one can put together an excellent system for far less.
Contemporary high-end audio exists, in large measure, as a reaction to the rise of what we might call 'consumer' audio in the 1970s. Cheap transistors made high-powered, reliable equipment with fantastic measurements (low total harmonic distortion, e.g.) widely available. Manufacturers began to compete on the basis of those measurements, and then on bells and whistles. Somewhere along the way, though, something got lost.
The consumer companies occasionally produced wonderful equipment, some of which is still sought after. (Kenwood tuners are a good example, and some of the larger three-way speakers of that era, by KLH and Advent and JBL, are seeing a revival.) But great measurements, it turned out, didn't mean great sound, and a lot of the stuff sounded like crap. And so the contemporary high-end was born in the form of small companies producing equipment with an eye to outstanding sound rather than stunning measurements. This equipment was unsurprisingly more expensive: There are no economies of scale here, and most high-end products are built the old-fashioned way, by human beings with soldering irons. But much of the equipment made in the late 1970s and early 1980s still sounds fantastic. Which is to say: A lot of this stuff was built to last. I often see Krell KSA-100 amps for sale, for example, and these came to market, as Krell's first product, in 1980. (For more reflections on the history of high-end audio, see Steven Stone's "History of High-end Audio" in Audiophile Review.)
