Come on Nigel, we have to tart up the hi-fi industry somehow. Can you imagine how dull it would be without a little exaggeration!
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…it’s better than the Chord version…it has a secret ingredient…collagen!
I agree. I find it hard to believe that every little tweak results in “night and day” differences - you’d have to start with a really bad sounding system for each improvement to be “huge”. Or, indeed, any improvement to be huge. You might get that by changing a component (speakers, particularly, as in my experience these seem to have the greatest influence on the sound of a system). But once you have a basically good system (decent pre-amp, amp, thick-enough speaker cables (no bell wire, for instance)) then improvements are unlikely to be “huge” without going from small speakers to large ones.
I simplify, but I simply don’t believe that the differences that are reported are as amazingly big as are often described.
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Indeed, such behaviour just devalues people’s opinion and that is what many of us are here for in the first place.
Surely that is just total silence? I have no problem, really, with the description “inky black background”, but surely once you have achieved that, there is no more that you can do in that regard.
I’m in the process of refurbishing my study (where my music server and related paraphernalia are located).
I’ve redecorated the walls partly in brilliant white as pure and clean as fresh snow, with a dusky grey feature wall that reminds me of sitting out at dusk, just before the inky blackness of the midnight sky…I need a desk that fully integrates with the night and day theme without proving to be a system mismatch. See, I’m getting there!
More importantly I need to set up a music system that fits with the small dimensions!
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I was thrown completely when an accountant I used some years ago said that when my business put money into its bank account, that was a debit. When the money was withdrawn, it was a credit.
Words failed me.
When I tried to persuade my bank manager that my large withdrawal meant that I was in credit, he didn’t appear to agree with me.
Inky blackness has surprisingly been the biggest change I have noticed from being a young toddler playing plastic records on the Fischer Price.
To other hifi.
The more that inky blackness shows itself, the more the music has a chance to show itself.
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Obviously (going by tge pic you posted), these days you only play black vinyl, otherwise you’d be hearing inky orangeness, greenness etc. Perhaps the best, however, would be inky transparency!
Problem with that set up, is it will produce very heavily coloured sound 
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If you add money to the bank it’s a credit from the bank’s perspective (the bank owe you the money so you are their creditor - hence ‘being in credit’) so it’s automatically a debit to your revenue account. Basically, income is always a credit, remember that and you won’t go wrong.
Don’t knock those old Fisher Price decks. I’ve never heard anything since with such low noise levels and absence of crackle. The records never needed cleaning either.
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I always had a mare getting the play-doh off mine though …
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Next you’ll be telling me you spread marmalade on them, just to prove they could still be played.
Perfect sound forever!
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A creamy treble that smoothed the essential pricklyness of an otherwise wintry detail presentation married to a Marianas Trench of a bass response. A glowing burnoose of midrange delicacy in the manner of the most expensive truffles.
Yum yum dimsum!
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…
And you do need to sit yourself down with a nice glass of single cask 27 year old Glenlossie - methinks.
I think that one problem that reviewers have is in finding new ways to express superlatives…these expressions of ‘goodness’ are, of course, important in selling advertising space. I think that they usually use plain English when expressing where a component might be deficient. Cynical me. We are a gullible lot though…anyone remember, in the 1980s, a reviewer advocating that we should all turn our speakers around 180 degrees so that the drivers are directly facing the wall rather than the listener. I never tried that one!
I remember that. I tried it. I can’t remember much about how it sounded, but I turned them back again. IIRC the treble lost out, but the soundstage widened a little.
Yes, its a simple as that, the darker the back ground the more detail you can see or hear when you are listening to music.
That particular writer was a prime force in my abandoning reading hifi press… that one was only one of the, erm, acoustically challenged ideas being published around that time.