[Editorial] Mission Impossible: critical listening in HiFi stores...

I've always remarked the necessity of performing some critical listening before any purchase, be it an amplifier, a loudspeaker or anything audio. Even better, such critical listening should be performed at home, within our system and room and it is difficult to persuade dealers to rent you the equipment for a whole weekend unless they are motivated by the prospect of an expensive sale.

Hence, you have to rely on the HiFi store listening room, but this can easily become a Russian roulette. HiFi stores are becoming rare, and good listening room even rarer. Moreover, it's risky, as HiFi dealers might spend hours of their time letting you listen to everything you wish, but then you decide to purchase elsewhere, mainly on-line, in order to cut down costs. This is unethical behaviour and it's up to us audiophiles to respect dealer's time, knowledge and work.

Now, let's suppose that we manage to find a good store, with a listening room and a kind, expert dealer who can assist and guide us. These three factors might not be sufficient, though. There's a fourth factor: is the room adequate to judge any difference between components or to allow us to detect the main characteristics of the component we wish to purchase? The answer, as it can be argued from the photo above is...it depends!

A listening room like this, with no acoustically-oriented treatment, where an entire wall is made of glass (and it doesn't change much if you cover it with a curtain) and which is also crowded with other speakers, it can't allow you to judge and understand the sound of a component. The risk of misunderstanding is extremely high and this certainly occurred to one of our readers who was trying to assess the sound of a pair of $12,000 Opera Gran Callas in that room. He was confused, to say the least.

Listening room acoustics influence at least 50% of the sound of a system. If the room is inadequate, any component will sound very bad, and it will be impossible to understand its quality level. Maybe it is a warm and not very aggressive speaker but, placed inside such an environment, it will start to scream in an unbearable way. Furthermore, the presence of reflective surfaces in 90% of the room creates countless reinforcements in the medium-high range and extreme confusion in the bass range as well. To make the situation worse, you can see a crowd of reflex-loaded cabinets, scattered everywhere, which act as resonance chambers, heavily altering the bass range response of the speaker under test and of the entire room. Let's not forget that a bass reflex cabinet is nothing more than a box tuned to resonate at a certain frequency, the tuning frequency. When an external sound wave hits it, it does what any tuned chamber would do, that is, it resonates. It acts as a Helmholtz radiator, which will absorb energy from the surrounding air at its resonant frequency! You can imagine how much damage the presence of such a speaker causes in the bass range. And that room has soooo many Helmholtz resonators!
I'm not a radical single speaker demonstrations supporter, but...enough is enough.

Plus, to make things worse... there's the listening position. I can tolerate not being seated at the center of the listening triangle, but at least I expect to be seated somewhere. You can't judge a loudspeaker while standing still. The reason, again, is technical: high frequencies are extremely directional, listening to a tweeter off-axis completely alters its ability to sound linear and correct.

The advice I would like to give, when the test conditions are like these, is: refrain from formulating any judgement and from taking decisions on the purchase or non-purchase of a component, as the probability of making a mistake is very close to 1 (i.e. 100%).

Someone might argue that a listening session like this is still better than nothing. No, nothing is better! It is better to purchase blindly, with the possibility of returning the component to the store, than to get wrong feelings about the sound of that component. Remember that the first impressions are hard to remove. Moreover, if the components we're about to purchase are expensive - here we were talking about speakers costing €12,000, as much as a small city car - it is crazy to think of taking a decision in this context. We should ask for more! Respect for our money, first and foremost.

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October 2024 Editorial

Judging any HiFi component in a HiFi store seems difficult, sometimes it's Mission Impossible!