Is it music or sound?

Is it music or is it sound? The music enthusiast would tell you that the music is all-important, while the hifi dealers will tell you that it is the sound that matters. To resolve the issue, albeit temporarily, I made it a point to visit the northern international audio-visual exhibition at the Amari Spice in Bayan Baru yesterday. 

It was the second time that such an AV fair was held in Penang. I visited this one on the second day and quite enjoyed myself visiting all the dealers' exhibitions, sat in for some talks (that is, opinions) and listened to some live music along the way. But after having spent something like five hours at the exhibition centre, I was too tired to stay back for the evening's live performances.

The dealers brought in some of their best equipment for the fair. Read that to mean their highest-end models: amplifiers, pre-amps, speakers, streaming boxes, cables, etc. To be expected, the sound quality was superb. All of them. Maybe the discerning listener with a good pair of ears, and perhaps deep pockets, may be able to pick up (or believe to be able to pick up) some delicate nuances and differences in the sound but to my aging ears, I really cannot tell them apart. But what I could differentiate was that the sound emanating from their million-ringgit setup was far, far better than from my old own modest home hi-fi system. To me, all the high, mid and low range sounds came through the speakers flawlessly. 

But was I listening to the (quality of) sound from their systems or should I just enjoy the sheer quality of the music? Before that is answered, I want to say that there were five or six talks arranged for the afternoon. I missed some of them as I had to share my time between attending the talks and walking through the exhibition. But I did catch Randy Messman who talked about affordable hi-fi. My takeaway from his talk was that an enthusiast does not need expensive hifi equipment to listen to music. His own musical journey began with only a walkman cassette player. As cheapaudioman, he runs a channel on YouTube dedicated to this stuff which he knows best. His mantra is to help other people fill their soul with happiness at all budgets with the healing power of music. 

The last speaker of the day, Sujesh Pavithran, brought home the same point, that one doesn't need to spend tens of thousands of ringgit on hifi equipment if one only wants to listen to, and enjoy, music. He could get by with perhaps RM3,000 or RM4,000 of equipment. During his days as a journalist with the Star newspaper, he ran the weekly Audiofile section of the newspaper.