My friends all make fun of me for the amount of audio equipment that I own. Not only do I have the latest in surround sound receivers, but I have high end speakers that will just blow your mind. The sound is positively unreal! All my friends laugh at me – they think that it is a waste to have such high end audio speakers. You see, all of us have the same taste in music. We all like punk rock, metal, hard-core, and basically anything that is loud and raucous. Why get high end stereo speakers, they ask, when you are listening to music that is often heavily distorted? Maybe I sound like a snob here, but I do not think that my friends understand the sophistication of the tunes that we are listening to. Just because it is punk rock, or metal, does not mean that it is noise. On the contrary, there is a great deal of subtlety and nuance in the tone that only good audio speakers can pick up.
Of course, it matters less with some of the music. The garage punk that I was into, for example, sounds about the same through high end speakers as it does through low end speakers. The sound is generally muffled, poorly recorded, and made on substandard equipment. As a result, no matter how lousy the speakers you use, it really will not make much of a difference in the way that it comes through. For that stuff their right – high end speakers really are a waste.
But for a lot of the metal, and even some of the more innovative and experimental punk rock, the high end speakers are really crucial. Just because a type of music is noisy this not mean that it does not have a wide range of sounds. High end speakers can capture all of the sound to the music, from the screeching highs to the booming lows, and everything in between. Without using a good high end speaker, so much of the sound is lost, and that is a shame. My high end speakers allow me to hear sounds that I've never heard before, and that I would not hear without them. It is my friends who are the snobs – low fidelity snobs. To them it seems like it all sounds the same. It is unfortunate that they will miss out on all the sonic nuances that I get to hear. But that's the breaks!
