Editorial May 2025

May 2025

Traveling is a thing that eats into one’s time at an alarming rate. So much so that April disappeared.

But another thing that eats time is listening to technical music. If I am honest listening to all music eats time but the hours whistled away in front of music simply never feel like hours. They just don’t – time when measured aurally does really seem to have a different beat, a different cadence and different meaning. Phew. Deep!

But what IS technical music?

That’s a little trickier to answer than may first appear. In essence it is music, or sound, that is set to demonstrate specific things around a technical aspect of music reproduction. For example if we consider bass it is possible to generate a flat bass frequency and to play that back on a system to reference how well the system is capable of reproducing said signal. It goes from this relatively simple exercise to extra ordinarily complex setups of sound stages, imaging and space, tonal integrity and much, much more.

It is not necessarily just about listening to sterile sounds – in most cases there is some music involved. Thankfully. But it doesn’t mean that all of it is pleasant. Some of it can be quite annoying if I’m honest and some of it just happens to demonstrate a particular element of music reproduction that we’re looking for as if almost by mistake… And then combining it all into a fruitful wholesomeness is what separates the men from the boys, order from chaos and satisfaction from edgy nervousness. It is when a sound stage is presented as it should be, when your ears can pick up what isn’t in front of your eyes and when you can start to distinguish depths and layers within music that are oddly tangible. Technical listening is part of what we do and when a system is good technically it cannot help but be good when connecting musically, and hence emotionally with you as the listener.

The more one does this the more we realise how much there is still to learn. I have spoken of DSP and the impact on recording tech and playback tech over the years. As it unfolds and as some of it is rendered in clinically severed terms for us, with so much access to it at unprecedented levels of quality and sheer span, it becomes a case of knowing more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. Never let it be said that you lose the love of why you started listening in earnest to your hi-fi, and that if you can keep two feet firmly on the ground and enjoy the hobby of hi-fi for what it does for you then I think you’ve arrived.

VampZilla is a beast of a thing to listen to. Anytime you’re in Joburg look me up and you can take a listen and see what you think. It is of course a car, and one that I cannot guarantee that you will enjoy but one that you most certainly will walk away with your mind ticking over.

William Kelly

Publisher