If you have crossed paths with people that are obsessed with high quality sound, or those that sell high quality sound equipment, or maybe as you go about your business you have heard the term Hi-fi then you are a star, if you haven’t, here’s your chance. Hi-Fi which is short for High Fidelity (Similar to its cousin Wi-Fi which is short for Wireless Fidelity) is a term used by audiophiles to describe the highest possible quality of sound output.
The word Fidelity means the degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced therefore High Fidelity is as the term suggested the best degree of exactness with which something is copied or reproduced.
So, what does Hi-Fi sound mean or better still, what does it sound like. To explain this, I will need to create a visual so here goes; When a music producer puts together a song by a musician, it is in its raw form, is heavy but is also at its purest.
To share this music, it is transferred to a storage device such as a CD or flash drive or it is sent on the cloud for sharing. During this process, the music file gets compressed to make it easier to share and in that compression process some of the quality of the sound is lost. Depending on the device you use to listen to the music, the quality of the sound may also diminish. For instance, using ordinary stereo headphones or speakers might sound good to most people but it almost always is lacking in quality.
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In comes that Hi-Fi. Hi-Fi music equipment is designed to pick up all the intonations and sound variations of the original sound that may have been lost through using ordinary speakers. To put it simply, Hi-Fi sound equipment reproduces music in its original format as recorded by the musician and as the musician intended for it to sound. Some audiophiles have described the output of Hi-Fi speakers with terms like warm or cold or even ambient which are terms used to describe emotion. This speaks to Hi-Fi sounds’ ability to reproduce music that not only sounds good, it makes you feel what the artist intended you to feel with their music.
Elit 