Editorial December 2025

December 2025

Happy holidays!

It would appear I may already be engaged in holiday mode sooner than most but the truth is that other work has been getting in the way…

Musical Accuracy eXcellence research has been taking up a lot of time too. I think I am finally approaching a point of comfort with my system at home and listening critically to reference tracks that are properly testing of any system is both rewarding and challenging.

I generally select music in such instances that I don’t enjoy to try and eliminate the emotional bias associated with it. But of course what happens is that over time as one becomes acquainted with the music you start to relate to it and then… you start to enjoy it! So annoying because then you need to go off and find more new music…

What happens in this process however is ongoing learning and adding to one’s experience banks. It is always interesting to compare notes with fellow listeners and indeed when bench marking what we use in MAX against other playlists used by reviewers I think our track selection is right up there. Of course we’re aiming for objective evaluation parameters couched in music as opposed to meters and dead mono tones because we’ve seen how such lab tests whilst useful, simply can’t replicate what music does with all it’s complexities.

It is what keeps reviewing hi-fi so interesting. I take a lot of criticism for my stance that there is no right or wrong but there is right and wrong. Some call it fence sitting but I prefer to explain it as a ethos or approach. You can have music that is completely generated artificially in a lab that you easily enjoy – and said music can be replicated on a hi-si setup that is horrible and nasty. But hi-fi is the art of reproduction, not the portrayal of creation. Hence if a system is able to recreate an instrument then it is, from my point of view, more interesting to me and a closer reproduction of what it is that I enjoy and expect from my music than a system that is able to recreate a generated electronic recording but which can’t replicate a musical instrument quite as accurately.

Compression is one way to look at it. It’s a great way to get music to the masses as quickly and as easily as possible but dynamic range is completely removed from the equation. This is not how we naturally hear things, but because there is all the detail there it still sounds almost great. Acceptable. Pop it against something that isn’t and suddenly the wheels on the bus fall off – our brains recompute and recalibrate with the inevitable result of which is better.

And not by a little margin either.

We saw this as the recent event at Cinema Architects. People new to hi-fi just couldn’t get over what their ears were hearing, some for the first time.

I often wonder if hi-fi dealers are akin to drug dealers – the first hit is free after which you’re hooked!

There are far worse addictions that a love of music, the universal language. It’s good for our psyches, it’s good for our well being and it’s good for our emotional connections with ourselves. Music is always inherently selfish, but a shared selfishness that everyone else can relate to – it’s a uniquely human characteristic that I’m not entirely sure I’ll ever fully understand but which I am entirely sure I will always love.

William Kelly

Publisher