Low-Fi, Hi-Fi Defined

It's low-fi if the recording is a test of your kit. As in I never heard the guitar part before.

It's entry-level hi-fi if you say That's really good, much better than what I had before.

It's hi-fi if your kit is a test of the recording. As in Jeez, that mix is a mess.

John Darko is the only reviewer who really talks about this. Sometimes the production just does not warrant a highly-accurate, clear, analytical set-up. All that does is make you hear every bit of scratchy playing, poor balance and messy microphone placement in the studio. Not to mention the faults in the recording deck, and the mixing engineer's tin ear.

Every time I've started doubting a piece of my kit, I put on a different piece of music, and there is everything I thought was missing before: the soundstage, the tight bass, the instrumental separation, the details. It was missing one the earlier music because it wasn't in the recording in the first place. If you doubt this, play some jazz from the late 1950's, preferably recorded by Rudy van Gelder. It's all there in the recording and mastering. Then play Seether, which is a terrific noise, but it's mixed for headphones and low-fi kit.

This raises an interesting question. Shouldn't we have different kit for different types of music? Distortion-heavy rock is not well-served by highly-analytical gear, but baroque and jazz is. It's not going to work for speaker-fi and amps, because the only people with more than one of those at any given time are reviewers. The rest of us pays the money and lives with the consequences. Choose the gear to suit what you spend most of your time listening to. I don't listen to a lot of distortion-heavy rock music.

When I do, it might be nice to have a pair of headphones to soften the harshness of the distortion. Which is maybe why some people have multiple headphones.