In the old days of analogue photography you could get a soft focus effect by smearing a small amount of vaseline on the lens of your camera. Put on a great blob of the stuff however, and the picture became unrecognisable. No matter how much you tried to focus, or how much better you made the resolution of the film, all you would do is make the picture look different, never better. You might like the colours in your photograph, but you could never get a good picture of the event you photographed.
Hi fi systems are the acoustic equivalents of the ‘vaselined’ lens, some of the very best systems have a light smearing, the worst are covered in layers of the stuff. The musical event is lost in the incoherence imposed by the system, and in the worst cases, you are just left to choose the sonic equivalent of which colours you like best – a treble v midrange v bass debate, or which sounds nicer. At the level of a ‘which sound is best’ debate MusicWorks products will be a hit and miss affair – do you prefer the sound one way or another, or maybe there is no discernable difference at all.
On the most musically coherent systems, the MusicWorks approach can provide huge benefits. Music is organised energy, and the MusicWorks approach maximises the coherence of this energy, keeping the musical intent, subtlety and communication intact. When describing the MusicWorks effect people often say it is like getting closer to the performers. This is not that (necessarily) the music gets louder, but is more to do with the feeling you get when you hear more of the direct sound and less reflected, the music becoming more intimate and personal. The reflections (time / amplitude / frequency distortions) you hear further back in a concert hall are very similar to the halo of incoherence that occurs when hi fi systems introduce timing errors.
So, are MusicWorks products for you, and your system?
Well, if you have speakers from a manufacturer who considers phase coherence important, then you have a very good starting point. If you have fast, coherent speakers & electronics, with good intrinsic dynamic range, better still. With this sort of system, in combination with judicious use of MusicWorks products you can have a hi fi system capable of conveying a huge amount of musical subtlety, and communication across a wide range of musical genres.
The fast ‘coherent’ hi fi alluded to above start at less than £2,000, so you do not need to look at spending megabucks on a high end system to get stunning musical results. If you do spend more on appropriate components however, the results are even more rewarding.
