Fidelity to Whom?
Quick quiz: What is a well-designed
high-fidelity system supposed to achieve? Flat frequency response and low distortion?
Accurate reproduction of the original recorded signal? Concert-hall realism? If you
answered "yes" to any of these you would agree with the majority of audio types,
professional or not.
But for as long as there has been a high-fidelity industry,
there has been a segment of it that claims a higher purpose: the artistic intent of the
creator of the material. The argument goes that the artist has a right to have you hear or
see a program as he intended, however imperfect that might be.
There's no reason that the principle needs to be at
variance with the more conventionally held aims of audio. If the artist creates his work
on a theoretically perfect system, manipulating it to his taste, and you play it back on
one just as perfect, you will hear what he intended. But there are no perfect systems; all
audio setups involve some compromises. So the artistic-intent idea would dictate that you
put up with the same compromises as the artist in order to be true to the intent.
For many years, the most frequently articulated version of
this notion was called "The JBL Philosophy." Back in the ‘70s, James B.
Lansing Sound of California insisted that the speakers you had in your home should tonally
match those a record producer used when he mastered and mixed his production, because only
that way could you hear what he wanted. Because a very large percentage of recording
studios in those days (as today) used JBL monitors, that meant you should run out and buy
JBLs for your home. In fact, the speaker the company pushed hardest using that argument
was the best-selling L100, which was in reality a tarted-up monitor.
It probably did sound quite like the monitors used in many
studios, but that didn't make it a very good speaker. One Canadian hi-fi magazine -- a
lone voice -- had these comments about that phenomenally successful speaker in 1971:
"Neither the bass nor treble were as extended as one might wish . . . I think
probably these deficiencies . . . point up the differences between true high-fidelity
speakers and those intended specifically for professional use. Professional speakers must
meet requirements such as reliability under strenuous all-day, every-day use, high
sensitivity, portability, physical ruggedness, etc. Meeting these requirements very often
forces compromises in one or more areas of fidelity . . . What this means is that, if
maximum fidelity is your concern, the JBL [L100] is not an outstanding choice."
Historically, JBL had made its name building speakers for
movie theaters, and the main challenge there was to make speakers that could fill a
theater using only the few watts available from the amplifiers of the day, and still be
intelligible when playing from behind a screen. The same speakers were used in the studios
where movie sound was mixed so the producers could hear what the moviegoers would hear.
Ultimately, those speakers found their way into recording
studios, where they became a fixture both because engineers were familiar with them and
because there was a virtue in consistency: It was valuable to be able to record something
in one studio and mix it in another and still have it sound pretty much the same. But
neutrality and wide frequency range and lack of coloration tended to lose out. The
consumer offspring of such speakers shared many of their faults.
Nowadays, JBL takes a very different view of things and
makes a number of excellent speakers by anybody's reckoning. Even so, a little bit of the
old philosophy creeps into their sales pitches now and then.
It's no coincidence that JBL grew out of the movie
business, and that it's in the area of home theater that their philosophy still has a lot
of the old force. Specifically, the main aim of the equipment standards that make up home
THX is to make your system sound more like a movie theater and less like a concert hall.
Fortunately, the THX standards are of a high technical
order, although not all audio designers agree with them, but their aim is still to present
to you as close a replica as possible of what the producer originally heard, even if his
system was affected by compromises that don't apply to you.
By the same token, video purists are adamant that movies
should always be watched in their widescreen versions because that's the way the director
framed his shots, and he has a right to have you see them that way. No matter that the
images are often much easier to see in the conventional 4:3 aspect ratio of most
television sets; the artistic intent is what matters.
Fortunately, we don't have to agree. Most movies look just
fine in their pan-and-scan versions, and any good speaker should be able to handle both
good music reproduction and the soundtracks of movies without doing violence to a
director's artistic integrity.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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