- Creating the right conditions in your home for a luxury audio experience
- Heavy solid equipment reflects a well designed and considered use of material for pure power supply
- Natural solid woods are time-honoured materials for cabinets
As Louis Armstrong once said, if you need to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know. Home audio enthusiasts can certainly attest to that. Likewise, luxury cannot be precisely defined, but it can be attained if the conditions allow it – and, like jazz, this is attained through the combination of the right elements together with our intentionality.
In previous times, luxury often meant displaying brands, opulence and indulgence. It’s even kitsch to be too eager to impress. In today’s world, luxury is more discreet and refined: it’s about curation, meaning, story, experience, quality of materials, connection with the artists or creators. It’s about coherence, beauty and vitality. A reflection of the most aspirational way to live. It requires intentionality and investment.
The Audio Experience
Luxury requires coherence throughout the curation and across the human experience and senses. From our physical senses to our emotional senses – the way we feel physically and emotionally in that moment.
The audio experience is perhaps the most transient of all the human senses and perhaps one that can augment the emotional feeling the most. To have a truly luxurious experience with audio we must also create the conditions for this luxurious experience to emerge.
Curation of Materials
To create a luxurious experience inside the home the conditions need to be right. One word that keeps recurring in high-end audio circles is ‘fidelity’. The purity of the sound. The highest fidelity (or hi-fi). The replication and transmission of the true, pure sound with the elements of the composition audibly resolved from each other.
Audiophiles have obsessed about this for decades, relentlessly trying to minimise distortion whilst trying to distil and reproduce a pure sound at every point between original recording to its replaying and listening.
Creating a Clear Sound Stage
In order to have a luxury experience with sound you need to have the technical requirements to produce the full spectrum of audible sound from deep chest-throbbing lows to delicate crystal clear highs and a clear sound stage across the room. You can hear and feel the difference.
Whilst a Casio watch tells the time accurately and can be a flex to wear one. A flex is a subtle but intentional display of taste, discernment, or cultural cachet, a sort of wink to others. But in audio, the same kind of flex doesn’t quite land if the sound quality isn’t there. No matter how refined or understated the brand or setup may appear, there are technical requirements that must be met for the listening experience to truly impress, especially to those who can tell the difference.
And you know when you are experiencing the finest sound when the hair stands up on the back of your neck, or indeed you are prompted to exclaim, as I once did, “Is Louis Armstrong in the room?”
Technical Requirement Must Be Met
The luxury experience of audio extends beyond the sound. It is also about design where form and functionality need to combine seamlessly across audio quality and visual aesthetics.
Here we again come back to story, curation, materials. Generally, in design, objects that look heavy feel reassuring and valuable. Loudspeakers should look and feel solid and this is instinctively true: solid cabinetry produces better sound, and smooth body curvature (like in instruments) lends itself to the reduction of resonance and internal interferences.
Solid Cabinetry Producing Better Sound
Likewise, natural solid woods are therefore time-honoured materials for cabinets. Also in terms of amplifiers, heavy solid equipment reflects a well designed and considered use of material for pure power supply and heat management to protect the amplification circuitry.
Turntables again reflect a need to have a physical connection with the original audio reproduction – to see the audio spinning, knowing that a diamond is accurately and precisely tracking the groove to resonate the sound from the artist’s recording, and that this is an everlasting physical object. Thick cables to allow maximum bandwidth through the woven copper or silver. The whole set up becomes an instrument in its own right. An instrument to produce the perfect sounds.
Perfect Sounds
Of course, at this point, the right choice of music becomes integral to take full advantage of the audio set up and to truly augment the luxury living: to capture one’s attention, and to move you according to whichever mood is appropriate at that time.
With these elements in place, the luxury seeker, like the jazz musician, can combine these elements with one’s personal style to create an expression of life at its most vital, fulfilling and luxurious.
Featured Brands
Featured brands:
- Finisterre Speakers by Saltwood Sounds
- Te Arai Console by Saltwood Sounds
- Carbon Double Shot by Java Hifi
- DMP A10 Eversolo Audio
