Hifi world has split remarkable way in two parts.  While the other part
is more or less haunting musicality and the emotional results music can do, the other part is very fond of sound and technology while music is being more of less left in the background.

Isn't sound and music the same?

No, peculiar enough, it seems not to be.  It really is possible to make hifi
with tremendous sound but with very little of core musical information.

How can this be possible?

Well, it must sound impossible to many ears.  But in the same time this 
may be the very reason why these split schools have been born.  

It is truly possible to make great sounding, and measuring, hifi with musically dead results and it is what has happened in reality.  

What do you mean?

As we all can propably agree, musical information should include as perfect "picture" from the original, real music, as possible.  This is our common goal.

In my opinion, this should mean that if the original live music listening situation makes you flush and feel certain emotions, you should, in the best case, flush again and feel those emotions as well when you are listening the music from your recording at home.  Can you cope with this?

Okay.  To reach this, we should be able to maintain the most important musical
parts in the signal.  First having it in the recording, naturally.  Then pick it up from it
and then have it flow through the whole signal path of our hifi system plus finally,
get it out from our loudspeakers or earphones through our room into our ears.  

Sounds complicated?  It is very complicated task.  More so than we often realize.
And this is the corner stone.  It is very difficult to design and produce hifi that is
able to maintain musical content very well in the signal path's all critical points.

If you fail here, you can still produce all the quantity as in most hifi does including major part of the expensive "exotic" high-end hifi.  This may result by finest of measurements. But true quality lacks. Which we cannot measure but only listen to.

What do you mean when you say "musical content"?

This is important thing.  It is basically the rhythmic and tonal content.
So this means maintaining strict and involving rhythm easy to follow.  It is a known
truth that a strict rhythm takes over human being like a beast.  It just takes him.  This is easily seen in our history and still today in concerts or among the more original ways of life.  Tribal peoples just dance like crazy in their celebrations and more often.  Usually by drums and other percussion only.

To maintain good rhythmic pace is hell of a difficult job.

Another more important part is the tonal content.  A measured frequency range being flat does not at all guarantee the proper tonal reproduction.  Musical tonal content is a very complex thing.  It means continually changing, simultaneous composition of tens, hundreds and actually rather thousands of different sounds.  This is a great challenge to any part of hifi system. 

The point here is that it is not enough to just reproduce the sounds somehow.  Even you could reproduce some of the sounds very sexy way.  It is not enough.  You should be able to keep coherence in the whole picture.  To be proper this may even include numerous acoustical cross effects between different instruments as some people have noticed in recent years.

Do you mean it is a question of timing?

Yes, importantly.  All the pieces should be in the same timing pace to keep the integrity.  It seems to be quite clear that if you cannot do this, you cannot speak about music for the important reason that the result is not anymore giving the same emotional feelings than the original music did.

This is the vital difference in the musical hifi and just good sounding hifi.

The timing will naturally act an important role in the rhythmical content too.  And this is not only the drums as we easily tend to think talking about rhythm.  This all means that all the sounds start and stop like they do in real music.  The shape of the starts and stops as well as the coherent timing in the whole music.  I mean compared to all other happenings in the music.  The timings should be in the same line to each other. 

The starts and stops of sounds really give us the feeling of a real instrument.  And everyone can presumably understand that I am talking about very short time gaps here.  The point is that different instruments have their own personal ways of start and stop their sounds.  Only most musical hifi components which can keep the timings in coherent pace are really able to give us the reality of musical instrumentation.  This is a very remarkable capability.

In reality this means that we can more easily distinct that this is a cello, a true cello which is played here.  Or this is a piccolo flute.  Or this is a Fender Stratocaster guitar and not a Telecaster model nor a Gibson Les Paul.  Or this is a Premier drum outfit, aha! I think he's got Ludwig's high steel snare drum in his Premier outfit and he's using metal sticks with nylong tips.

Is it important to distinct the brands of the instruments?

Well, yes and no.  For musicians perhaps yes.  I was just trying to show how truly  sensitive a musical signal really is and should be when we try to do our best in reproducing it.  If you have it that good you propably have it otherwise good involving as well.  For instance easily detect minute alterations of notes.  This all is reality with a fine set of hifi.  But not with most of the hifi, even many of the most expensive cannot do the task.   With them you are not really listening music.  You cannot very well i.e. evaluate performances of the artists.

About the timing.  This is also making the proper rhythm.  Starts and stops of the rhythmic sounds, like the drums and the base, are really determining how the rhythm is keeping in time and thus involving the listener.  So in the same time when timing makes a drum sound like a drum it is also giving the effect of the good rhythm to us and make us tap our foot or start swinging our bodies.

See, you do not need much fluctuation in starts' and stops' timings and you will have an unstable rhythm.  And this, while is not really recognized conciously by listener but only some musicians, will result a rhythm not involving.  For this reason some of the best hifi manufacturers have said that good reproduction should make your foot tap.

How the musical quality is not noticed in the hifi magazines' comparisons?

It is sometimes.  There is differencies in between the editors and magazines.
Some are more open to the musicality than others.  Some are more oriented towards technology itself and sound differencies (which really won't lead anywhere).

We have to understand that musical reproduction is a whole body of knowledge.  If you have not grasped it you cannot understand it.  And so is the more techonology minded hifi.  If you have adopted the idea of scientific measuring as the most important way of compare, then you basically think there cannot be differencies by any relevance as there is not much difference in the measurements done i.e. with the amplifiers or CD-players.

You have to LEARN to listen the musical parts of the signal if you wish to distinct musically better components out the worse.  It is not difficult at all when you have learned to listen the musical way.  

We also have to arrange our acoustic environment properly or we cannot hear music well even we had good hifi to listen to.  I mean we cannot hear even a real piano musically well in certain, very common, environmental situations.  This makes it for many people, and editors too, tough to find the musicality.  I understand their situation very well.

And if you are very fond of tech and science you may have blocked your mind by the idea of subjectivity and you may seriously question the reliability of such way of evaluating.  Musically speaking listening is, however, the only way to evaluate as you cannot find it out by measuring something.

So for many editors and other people as well there lies a double trap making better understanding to hide from them.  First there is the mental scientific attitude to over-value the limited and insufficient measurements.  The second is listening in acoustically such way arranged environments which make it very hard to hear and distinct musical assets of certain components against others.  

I think these two main reasons keep on the technical, non-musical hifi to go on.  

As I said before this has caused two different schools go on.  Science has been very popular during the latest 30 years.  It has regrettably oriented lots of people into wrong paths to trust only on scientific measurements.  Many people do not understand how really limited and insufficient the scientific methods are to find out ultimate truths in all the areas of life.  Science is methodically continually evolving research continuum.  It is not studying everything but the directions which certain professors and common opinions think to be important.  And science itself is in the early stage still.  Long way to go further to reach the ultimate truths.  

In many, many paths of life, the real life people and companies are leading in the knowledge.  Hifi has been one of these paths.  It has never been a really interesting area for the scientists.  Very little has been invested into study of music reproduction in scientific world.  We should keep this in mind before we choose scientific approach for our leading guide in evaluating hifi.  

Our own understanding and trust into our own ears are by far the better guides here.  And will be for long time to come.  So it makes worth to learn how to listen the best way to understand better what is good and what is not.

Is this basically a question of what to measure?

Of course it is.  We just don't know yet what or how to measure to have sufficient, valuable results on the musically stringent contents and capabilities.  Perhaps some of the manufacturers can do some sufficient measuring.  I mean some of those rare really musical manufacturers.  It cannot be an accident to produce a really musical electronics.  You obviously have to know what you are seeking 

(Accidentally you can propably make musical components only if you are producing small loudspeakers.  But it won't work always even with them as you can goofe there too)

It is clear that our measurements of the frequency range by sweeping one or two sine wave signals through a component, we cannot tell much of anything of the musical abilities.  The same concerning the few distortion measurements conducted usually.  It is much too basic as a measurement.

I doubt that a musically good hifi component would measure really bad in the signal measurements.  But I am sure some of them could measure "worse" in the scientific way than some others and still play music much better.  This is telling that our measurement ideas for hifi are not relevant.

Do this mean that there is really no value in the measurements?

Not so.  But yes in that way that if you are buying new hifi the only way worthful  is to listen.  You cannot but accidentally hit right by reading measurement specifications. 

Measuring is important in that way that it can lead us some day for more relevant measuring.  But this scientific path seems to develop very, very slowly obviously for the lack of study.

I think measuring is more relevant in the stages of the manufacturers' research and development and production control for the parts not directly handling the music signal.  Like the power supplies or tuner sensitivities etc.  These kind of measurements are naturally valid and important.  

But also in measurements of individual signal line electronic components in validating means of production.  This is done for narrowing the quality specifications and fluctuations of the electronic component factories.

Well, the main question of this interview  - how to distinct musicality?

This is the point.  Stop listening sounds.  Start listening music.

I was myself  for some 20 years a hifi enthusiast.  I was very technical and fond of specs.  I was making "improvements" all the time.  The sound of my hifi became "better and better".  

I have to admit that sometimes I had difficulties in believing in what I was doing.  I somehow lost my direction and thought if I ever really had reached anything.

Later I realized clearly that I did not reach much.  I even lost some things in the line of "improving".  I managed to make my hifi even more dead and clinical.  Pure and powerful, tight and fast in transients.  Dynamic.  But I got it dead and noisy.  Non-involving but via high punch and volume.  Volume and bigger loudspeakers became more important.

I am not eager to mention any manufacturers or brands here but I can tell I was following the scientifically thinking people.  So the transient ability meant a lot for me and I always asked a square wave curves for the component I was interested in.  Signal to noise ratios.  Distortion curves.  RMS powers.  And I was interested in everything in hifi.  Specific add-ons. Cables.  I had piles of brochures and comparison test copies in my files.

Until I was one day showed by competent people, what is listening music.  It was a tough experience for me as I had previously been a musician for ten years.  And somebody wanted to teach me to listen music!

But I got humble enough to learn something new.  And the whole music really opened to me in a new way.  This changed my attitudes to hifi quite fast bit by bit.  It cannot happen in a day that you drop your decades long ideals.  It will take days, weeks, months and years. 

You find yourself still after years admiring some amps or speakers even you now can hear they are not musical at all.  And this is totally okay as you can admire components and manufacturers for many reasons.  Nice finish and long career deserve admiration even they have chosen some wrong roads.  It happens so easily in this tech minded hifi world.

But the music becomes more important and you can enjoy much more you ever before did on purely musical things.  And you can as well easily evaluate components, halls, instruments and even musicians and compositions in the musical basis after you have learned to listen the music on the musical aspects.

Okay, but how you can do this, tell me?

Yes I will.  You just go into the music.  You just go in tune and "sing along" in your mind.  You will soon learn to notice if it is easy to sing along or not.  Then you learn to note your own natural indicators. 

You should have here A-B comparison opportunities to start detecting it.  But to manage to do that you should first be able to make your acoustical environment valid to hear music well.

It is important to understand how the environment has to be arranged as otherwise you can propable never find these differencies.  It is a bit longer story we can handle here and that is why I wrote my new E-Book Unleash Your Music!
It is the first book of it's kind I have seen.  In this book I will tell it all, how and why to set up your environment and your whole hifi system in musically optimal way and how to learn listening the musical way. 

This book is, while I will never be thoroughly satisfied to it myself, an invaluable pack of knowledge to anyone interested in music and/or hifi.  It is very important knowledge also for musicians, studio professionals and hifi manufacturers.  They all can enchange their professional outcomes with this knowledge.

O.K. I got your message now.  Where can I find your book?

It is an E-Book as I already mentioned.  This means that it exists only in electronic form.  You can download it directly from my website.  You can find it through numerous links on music and hifi sites or by going directly to my own site in the address:
www.music.in-your-mind.com

Thank you!

You are welcome!