What is high fidelity?

High Fidelity stands for, or at least should stand for - hi quality reproduction of music as close as possible to authentic concert Sound of Music.

In etymology it comes form Latin Fides that translates in English as FAITH, so the phrase is FAITHFULL — something that’s as FAITHFULL to the original as possible. This is what is behind this high fidelity phrase that we use for more than 60 years.
But only recently we found out that one of the major records labels, that is credited and in my opinion deservedly so, with whole vinyl revival hype in recent years, is producing their analog LP records from digital source…

The difference between analog and digital is basically that analog is continuous signal, and digital signal with 0 and 1 has to have some kind of loss because it’s not analog it’s just not continuous. Making analog signal form digital source is a bit like making and orange from the orange juice. But people bought it and liked it! And from one quick on-line survey 36% of them said they would do it again.

This whole “scandal” got me thinking,

I started thinking what else in our life is close or distant from high fidelity concept. So if record label company that is called “Mobile Fidelity” is making analog LP records from digital source… then what else is not like it was supposed to be?
Here at HiFi-furniture.com we are making HiFi Racks & stands, and in that process we try to make each HiFi rack or speaker in that way that end product is as natural as possible. We ensure this by using natural materials with natural techniques, just trying not to mess with nature as much as much we can. We are trying but this is not something that is normal or standard these days. The MOFI scandal only pointed out to the concept of living that is predominant these days.

When we started making HiFi racks from solid wood and started avoiding anything artificial, artificial colors, artificial finishing, trying to do it only with natural wood and hardwax oil with no solvent, so everything could be done as close as it could be in the way of the nature. People started coming to us and explained that this is not the proper way to do it. Apparently wood is a material that can be “bettered“, and now there are materials out there that have better ”technical qualities“ for whatever reason. As it turned out those materials are made of mashed wood with all kind of different additives and chemicals to make it into „dead“ wooden material , and later veneer it with a thin layer of real wood to make it look like a real wood…. At the end of the game, they tried explaining to us that fake wood is better than real solid wood.

All of a sudden I started seeing those kind of things all around us, and this is why I’m writing this few lines.

This kind of behavior is not only happening in production of LP records. It is not exclusive only in HiFi furniture business. That’s actually the way we live now!!!
So now we are as far away from original as we have ever been in human history. When you take up any bottle of anything in your bathroom, and then you turn it around on the other side and you will see that you cannot read most of the words that are in description of what that bottle contains.
So soap is no longer just soap, what we eat is also genetically modified, the juice in our store prides itself that it has 7% of fruit content. We are spraying fake, we are eating fake, we are living fake and nobody seems to mind This is the appalling tragedy of our time.

Why is this happening? As I mentioned there was a ballot for people who used to buy records that were supposed to be analog but they were from digital source and 36% percent of them stated that they would buy it again because it sounds better. And this is the response that you will receive most of the time. I know, junk food is bad and it’s totally addictive and totally fake but, I will go on and buy it again because it TASTES GOOD . The problem as it seems is the fact that we lost our sense of TASTE. So we would rather drink 7% Fruit content orange juice. Then make orange juice ourselves with 100% content of oranges, and this is the choice that we make unconsciously day in and day out.

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Where is the fidelity and all of that? Where is the FAITHFULL as it can be to the original in all of that? Nowhere, because we are searching for this blissful moment that is achieved by everything artificial. Today’s Music Most of the time does not have instruments in it, there’s actually no people playing anything, artificially generated sounds and it goes even further. Even new drugs these days are synthetic…

How can we stay true to the fidelity concept? The real reason why we would like and why would we love, and wish to be, in this fidelity concept is because this is the way human being was supposed to live. So when Nature, God, however you want to call It created us the intention was that we need to eat from this earth, and need to listen to It, and breathe It’s air, use recourses, use them them wisely and with respect. Somewhere down the line, and I would say especially in in last 300 years, and then especially in last 70 years, we somehow as species lost our track and lost compass totally. Right now we are consuming, consuming, throwing away, recycling (if you know how), and then still consume, consume, spend throw away etc. It was not like that only 70 years ago, it was not the only concept. This is what we want to revive in HiFi-furniture.com . Want to create something that will be beautiful, useful enough and have value for future generations. Our most prized pieces of furniture have been handed over to us by our grandfathers. LP collection has been passed down to me by my uncle and it’s priceless because in that LP collections resonates youth of my uncle and my mother. Remembering these kind of things makes us understand that history didn’t start with us and that we will need to leave it to somebody else. But nowadays we do the “ecological dramas”, green energy and whatever, but we still don’t think, we still do not understand it completely. We are all too ready to jump and use electrical cars and gadgets and whatever, but I think we see it all only as a new toy. I don’t really feel that many people are considering this from right point of view. We use this narrative to ease our conches.

The right point of view is that not everything starts with me and ends with me. If we just look at things from bird’s eye perspective, then we will see that the true ecological minds will start caring about what kinds of things they use and how they use them. Not only the billboard type of ecology, where I will buy lithium run cars and I don’t care how that lithium got to that car. If you Google it up, then you’ll see that lithium is very dirty thing to mine and it kind of destroys everything around it. I mean, for Christ’s sake, they invented my mini hydro-electric power plants. Basically what they do is they pipe up a river so it could rune turbine and creates electricity. They call that renewable energy. It is renewable, but it destroys the whole ecosystem, the whole region trough which this small river is running. These projects get approval from the government’s, from local authorities, hundreds of people needed to say YES, and nobody even asked the question how or why? They are not stupid. They just don’t care! Somebody somewhere nicely explained that it is needed, that it is progress, it is new thing, and they said okay. Just like that!
Meanwhile, we are nodding our head and buying junk, eating junk, living in junk, surrounded by junk and listening to junk. Because it tastes, sounds, smells “better“.

Okay, maybe it’s perfumed junk, but it is still junk, think about it!