Accepted Wisdom?
I’ve never been a great believer in accepted wisdom and, looking back, I’m happy that the years have usually proven me right, in dismissing, or at least questioning, those things that ‘everybody knew’.
For instance, I could never come to terms with solid core cables although their proponents kept telling me how wonderful they were. Looking around today’s market shows that they barely stood the test of time, despite all the avid tweaks’ assertions that they represented the ‘only way to go’. I’m thankful that they did, indeed, go because I disliked their sound, their fragility and their impracticality. I still remember one lightweight pre-amplifier hovering, like some ghostly manifestation, above the table it was supposed to be sitting on because the solid interconnects it used were so inflexible.
Then, of course, we had the rigidity myth: tone-arms had to be rigid and built to resemble bridge girders until designs such as the Naim uni-pivot came along and disproved that theory. In light of this, many ‘floppy’ arms such as the venerable Decca, Hadcock and Mayware were, effectively, rediscovered, and, all of a sudden, the once immutable rules were rewritten.
The rigidity argument also extended to loudspeakers and this was where things became a little less cut and dried because while most loudspeakers certainly benefited from a solid coupling to the floor not all of them did. There were several noteworthy designs that enjoyed a little more freedom. Take the magnificent Shahinian Obelisk as an example. This came fitted not with spikes but with castors. Castors, for goodness’ sake! And, guess what, it sounded far better when used as supplied than when it was spiked and rigidly coupled to the floor.
Equally, every support manufacturer was once resolutely convinced that glass was not a suitable material for table tops: it looked attractive, yes, but it rang and that was reflected in the sound of the components one placed upon it. Glass shelves were a definite no no. Then, along came John Watson with his glass-shelved Mana platforms, which blew the performance of all other tables into the weeds. You could almost hear the crunching and grinding as the industry hurriedly slammed itself into reverse gear. Suddenly, glass was declared to be a good thing. Look around today and it’s hard to find a support range that doesn’t feature glass shelves.
When you move beyond the widely accepted wisdom mythologies into the zone of seriously obsessive tweakiness, we reach the land of sticky foil, crocodile clips attached to your water pipes and ‘treated’ safety pins in your soft furnishings, where the advocates and opponents were so vociferously divided that the words wisdom and accepted never entered into the discussions.
On the extreme outer reaches of this type of craziness, we find the first (I think) female, American, hi-fi scribe who proposed removing one’s jewellery before listening to one’s hi-fi in order to improve its sound. Absurd? That’s nothing compared to her next suggestion, which was to remove all your clothing – which, I presume, promoted a whole lot of stammering when less well-read family members started asking audiophiles to explain exactly what they were doing sitting naked in front of the hi-fi.
