“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” Martin Mull, 1979.
All of the other fine arts – painting, photography, poetry, prose, theatre, sculpture and so on – can be described to someone unfamiliar with the work. But music is different. To an audience of 1000 people, a single song may very well have 1000 different interpretations. This is why High Fidelity (HiFi) sound is key to an exceptional listening experience. The technology uncovers the depth and richness of original sounds and gives listeners the chance to experience the music that they love in a different way, fuelled by clarity, transparency and perfect audio.
To a world-wide audience, a song has as many different meanings and emotional reactions as there are listeners. Art is subjective. It’s personal, and music is perhaps the most intimate artform there is. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the magic of art exists in our ears.
The Magic of High-Fidelity Sound
"Of all art, music is the most indefinable and the most expressive, the most insubstantial and the most immediate, the most transitory and the most imperishable. Transformed to a dance of electrons along a wire, its ghost lives on. When KEF returns music to its rightful habituation, your ears and mind, they aim to do so in the most natural way they can – without drama, without exaggeration, without artifice." - Raymond Cooke OBE, Founder of KEF, and the father of modern loudspeaker design.
The entire home audio industry exists for one purpose – to capture a performance, store it and make it available for the rest of us to enjoy. For thousands of years, musical performances lasted for only a brief moment in time, to live on solely in the memory of those fortunate enough to hear the performance.
We take recorded music for granted, but having HiFi sound travel through our speakers and into our ears truly is a magical thing. Whether a finely captured video performance by your favourite artist, or a song painstakingly and lovingly crafted in a recording studio, with the right equipment, we can listen to songs exactly as the artists intended.
The Journey Of 1000 Miles Begins With A Single Note
Music is a personal journey, one that begins the day you hear your first song and continues with you forever after. Music reminds us of who we are, where we come from, who we want to be, and what we want out of life. A sculpture captures a singular moment in time, a painting captures the essence of the artist’s imagination, a good novel carries us away temporarily. But a song does all of that and one other magical thing – it becomes a part of your emotions and memories.
When you hear a passage from your favourite book, your response is logical, but you don’t relive the story – you are not transported anywhere. Music is the noise of the Universe. Pick an emotion and you likely already have a song to cover it. Pick a feeling or a state of mind, and you have a personal library of go-to songs waiting to take you there. That playlist in your mind is yours and yours alone – it is as unique in the world as you are. Try that with a painting. And today, with high-resolution streaming and the amazing availability of HiFi sound, we can all experience the true beauty and essence of music at the click of a button.
But Why HiFi?
Because we cheat ourselves when we deny our ears and minds the full beauty of music. When listening to music without all of the nuance and magic, the full story isn’t told. Music lives and breathes in air, it is designed to envelope us fully. When we don’t give our music the full chance to exist before us in its purest form, we might as well throw the whole experience away.
Music is not meant to be a mere background to life. That’s not to say you can’t get the same joy listening to the right song at the right time on a smart speaker – you can. But a steady LoFi diet makes the soul hunger for something it may not even be able to define. We know there is more to our music – and we crave it – but until we hear it in all its glory and beauty, we can’t know what we are missing. The beautiful thing is, once you hear music as it was meant to be heard, it suddenly exists with all the beauty and majesty your mind had hoped it would.
That’s why HiFi music is an essential part of life. It may be the soundtrack to our lives, but we cheat ourselves when we merely make it the background of our lives. Twenty minutes of great sounding music a day can solve more problems than pretty much anything else. When played back to its fullest potential, music returns the magic to our lives.
And couldn’t we all use a little more magic?
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