In this short blog article, I would like to share my thoughts on what I recently experienced with dismay in the high-end audio community.
I would like to emphasize once again that I am a passionate collector and listener of analog vinyl records. I have been pursuing this hobby with dedication for many decades. Digital sound, especially the CD, has never appealed to me emotionally, which is why I do not own any digital equipment. Of course, digital audio has developed significantly with high-resolution variants, and I am keeping a close eye on this development. Word should also have gotten around that I research and design acoustic horn loudspeakers. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to the horn loudspeaker whether the music source was analog or digital! The human ear is not capable of hearing digitally, either. And at the signal terminals of any electroacoustic transducer, the signal must be analog. So anyone interested in my inventions should, in principle, not really care whether I personally listen to analog or digital.
Recently, someone contacted me via social media and asked me to play a certain digital music track on my system, record it with my smartphone, and share it. First off, to my knowledge, the built-in microphone and electronics in a smartphone are the limiting factors, and the result only reflects a fraction of the actual listening experience. I have tried this already several times and the result is acceptable, but nothing more. It is by no means suitable for assessing the quality of a playback chain. When I openly communicated that I don’t listen digitally in my private setup, the response from the other person was very surprising to me:
“It is impossible to associate with people who do not do digital. Bye!”
Maybe there was some kind of translation issue into a foreign language involved, but I would like to emphasize at this point that I do not discriminate against or cancel people who pursue this hobby with a different focus. And I wish that others wouldn’t do that to me, either. I would love to listen to my horn loudspeakers in a dedicated digital chain in the future, and possibly also explore high-resolution digital audio. However, my record collection is so large that I haven’t felt the need to do so yet.
One final appeal. Be more forgiving towards each other, be more forgiving towards me. There is enough cancel culture in this world. We shouldn’t burden our hobby with it.