MUSINGS: On audio gear appearance and design. (A case of the HiFi Rose RA180 and Audio Jewelry.)

As work calms down into the holiday season, I thought it would be fun today to talk about what's obviously a subjective matter... Appearance.

Clearly, aesthetics are matters to be adjudicated "in the eye of the beholder". Although in these pages, I'm more curious about sound quality and using objective means to test and demonstrate the resolution of devices, appearances certainly do matter even if for me that's not the highest priority. Of course a good looking sound system is pleasing to the eye, improves the ambiance of one's room, might impress other audio friends, and there's always that "wife/spouse/partner acceptance factor" (let's just call this the traditional WAF). For marital harmony, it is only fair to receive feedback about one's system occupying a shared space. Whenever possible, I would highly recommend a dedicated room as the only way to go if you're desiring to be a hardcore, freedom-loving audiophile beyond "head-fi". ;-)

On the one extreme, there are "ugly" looking, rough, DIY-like systems. Many commercial speakers from back in the day looked like this. For example, I came across a picture of the Dahlquist DQ-10 behind the grille; these speakers were made back in the mid-70's:

That's a rather ghastly looking 5-way design but I'm sure it can sound good (with certain music?). Beyond the frequency response, I wonder what the time domain step response of something like that would look like. When dressed up a bit, WAF might not be too bad as discussed in this article.

A modern design which I thought sounded amazing when I heard it recently at PAF'22 was the Linkwitz LX521:

Certainly unique in appearance, but the open baffle design and shape are definitely going to get some comments from my wife if I put those in the living room!

Over the years, I've come across many forum threads where participants show off some of the most disturbing or ugly looking products - see here and here for examples of this "genre" of discussions. Notice that many of these products are rather esoteric designs and also can be very expensive.

The Living Voice Vox Olympian is a "beauty" with the company asking somewhere around US$300,000:

I don't know why their website doesn't show off this looker more; notice instead the pictures are close-ups of parts like the tweeter section rather than showing us the full image like the gorgeous one above! ;-)

As an interesting case example of something recent, let's focus on the device in the header of this post, the HiFi Rose RA180. If you're wondering about what all the dials and knobs and sliders and switches are for, here it is with labels:

Notice the "tripod" footers. The left half of the device looks more traditional with the NAGRA-like large input selector switch, and vintage rotating knobs. The preamp slider for R/L balance also looks vintage and overall the side-by-side knobs make sense: for example, bass-treble levels, high pass crossover settings, and phono EQ seem reasonable. The ON/OFF switches are consistently up for ON, great.

The right side to me is where things really look odd. Why are the left and right VU meters positioned top and bottom? Then there's the apparently steampunk-inspired hexagonal volume control knob with gears and the saw-toothed "Volume Meter". Finally on the far right, it looks more traditional again except for the odd angled/curved "Pure Direct" switch which doesn't seem to complement the other design elements which are either round or more sharply angled. Clearly some of this is purely decorative like the volume knob with its logo outline pattern, volume control gears and that curved switch. There's a mish-mash of incoherent design elements that do not seem to enhance the function, but rather seems to add complexity for its own sake, ultimately I feel distracted by the "look". I wonder what the design team was trying to get at in putting those elements together!?

There is a matter of proportion we can talk about as well. Whereas the preamp section with bass/treble and balance could be useful and the larger size of the controls allow for ease of access, do we need the same large sized active crossover knobs or similar real-estate given to the phono EQ? I would imagine that these would generally be "set and forget until the next upgrade" controls that probably don't need to be as prominent as they are. Perhaps making them smaller and shifting them towards the volume control knob while dropping the Preamp section down might give space for larger R/L VU meters that would be esthetically more pleasing to look at.

So I wondered, "Am I the only person who has a negative opinion on the appearance of this product? Do other audiophiles actually think this looks cool?"

Well, the only way to find out if my opinion is in the minority is to run a poll. So over the last couple of weeks, I put up a post on Steve Hoffman Forum asking if readers liked the "look" of that front panel. Here's a snapshot of the results as of December 15, 2022:

As you can see, out of 285 respondents, the majority at almost 63% were not impressed by the appearance of this HiFi Rose integrated amp. And that's rather conservative because another 22.5% had some reservations so it's not like they're in love with the design either.

Even though I have been told that "in person", this machine looks better than the pictures, I think the oddities of the design itself unnecessarily detracts from what really should be a very high performance device with low-distortion GaN FET-based Class D amplifier modules, quad channels, good power with the ability to bridge outputs for up to 400Wpc (8Ω), subwoofer output, balanced analogue input (just 1 pair unfortunately), adjustable phono preamp...

While one might have reservations about the appearance of something like the Linkwitz LX521 speakers above, at least we can appreciate that with most speakers, there typically a methodical "form follows function" approach based on measured performance to fit the dispersion pattern of the SEAS drivers in the design. Likewise, speakers like the BeoLab 90 (which I checked out a few years back):

Obviously these look very unusual, but again, there are technical reasons why they did this; it's a "forced choice" where the engineers went with the appearance to achieve intended sonic goals. Heck, maybe even the Living Voice speaker "needed" to look like that.

We cannot say the same about that front panel of the HiFi Rose RA180. There is no other way to say it other than to imply that the whole volume knob/gears hexagonal section appears to be "audio jewelry" which was designed to entice audiophiles, presumably. I guess it worked on Stereophile's Julie Mullins who "was smitten" in her review.

At an asking price of US$7000, I wonder how much it would cost if HiFi Rose just stuck with a less fancy front panel - let's just take away that "fine art" premium. Might they be able to drop the price down to a more reasonable ~US$5k mark? That's still a pretty good price I think for some great technology under the hood with superb build quality for VU meters, switches and knobs. Since hi-fi is a technical hobby, most audiophiles are guys, and I think most also are more likely to insist that they're interested in sound quality, there's a limit to how far a device can overtly act as "audio jewelry". We buy these products to reproduce art (music), not primarily as art pieces in themselves.

I think this South Korean company's focus on the appearance is an example of going a bit too far, especially with the design inconsistencies. Notice also the huge disparity between the amp's neo-retro look compared to their modern wide LCD-screen digital streamer, the RS150, often seen together in demo pictures:

MSRP US$5000.

The digital streamer even seems to have 4 feet rather than the tripod. ;-)

Speaking of Julie Mullins (who also writes for The Absolute Sound), I see she penned the recent "Re-Tales #27: Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes in the hi-fi industry".

One of the changes being discussed was the idea of the "trend toward hiding hi-fi will change when customers are exposed to more attractive alternatives. Sound isn't everything after all; design matters, too". Indeed, design matters, however I don't think the RA180 is going to be converting too many consumers based on those poll results! Then again, maybe the HiFi Rose isn't being marketed to traditional audio hobbyists so running a poll on the SH Forum might have been the wrong place? But if this is the case, where should we run such a poll? For example, "lifestyle" technology consumers who love the look of something like Apple products probably would find the controls too complex and inelegant even if they were OK with the price. One wonders what kind of market research was done or focus groups asked to provide feedback on this design.

Another interesting comment from the Mullins article concerns something we already know: "From the industry perspective, a big part of hi-fi's future is in luxury goods." As usual, I think it's important for hobbyists to differentiate real "Hi-Fi" from the luxury "High End"; one cannot just throw the goal of high fidelity audio reproduction which is a technical description with luxury products as if the "industry" is some monolithic entity. Clearly, she's talking about Stereophile catering to a specific kind of niche industry.

High-Fidelity performance does not require High End / luxury pricing especially these days as technology has progressed. Likewise, many products in the High End might fail to stay on par with other much less expensive devices on tests of High-Fidelity - for example, five-figure D'Agostino amps might be beautiful to look at (as reported in the Mullins article, being of high WAF in her example) but aren't particularly known for high fidelity performance on the test bench. For years, we have talked about and I believe understood the non-utilitarian benefits of luxury. Perhaps understandably, magazines like Stereophile and TAS and Hi-Fi+ will not emphasize the difference as they service that Industry. And as discussed a year ago, I believe there are complex audiophile psychological dynamics at play worth being mindful of as hobbyists.

Alright everyone, I might or might not get a chance to chat with y'all for the rest of December due to festivities around here. If not, I wish you a wonderful Christmas and Happy New Year!