hifi means high fidelity which means as close to reality as possible. it has nothing to do with details, "musical sound" what anyone likes or dislikes. it was about trying to come as close as possible to what you hear when you are standing in front of musicians. no harman mass tastes, not ultra high resultion, no extension at the ends of the frequency response, nothing everyone and their mother is discussing these days. since the beats headphones came up, the masses think they know what "good sound" has to be like. harman wrote a scientific paper about what the masses thinks this kind of sound is like and as the masses are what companys make the most money from, most companys went this masses route. and that is what we now have in "hifi". its all about marketing bs with either crazy numbers only people that "believe" think they can hear or with sound signatures the masses like. hifiman for example noticed, "oh it seems like the masses think exaggerated treble equals details, lets make some headphones like this" Qualcom thought "oh the masses think the higher resolution the better, they even think they can hear differences in resolutions above 164kbs AAC compression. Lets find some ways to push this agenda" and so on. i dont even want to begin with the cable industry. omg, what people think they can hear regarding cables has become so ridiculous. Even the producer Georg Lucas jumped on this by creating his THX brand, because people thought loud bass in cinemas equals good sound and THX still catches so many people, although it has nothing to do with "good sound", than than they needed a new marketing instrument and created high res. What on earth is high res sound? Why shouldnt a cd not be high res? they already tried similar with Super audio CDs, which still some people believe in. and than there are many things that became trends because of all that mess, like the people that bought "ultra resolving" aka bright headphones nowadays think they need tube amps and r2r dacs because they sound more "musical" but finally it is just their subconsciousness that tells them, their headphones dont sound like reality, lets find ways to tame the exaggerated treble. This has become such a cash cow for many companies one profiting from the other and people still think they have "hifi" as a hobby and throw their money at the flashiest taste of the month, but still dont know at all what hifi is about. It even has become much easier for companies as all the badly educated "influencers" with zero knowledge about physics transport all the marketing propaganda and people believe they are the ones, that they should trust. everyone should instead read at least one or two scientific papers about psychoacoustics, at least the "believers". now roast me if you want to, idc...
