Mid-fi gear is the step above mass market crap. It is generally more expensive, and was usually purchased with the hope of matching well with the buyer's other gear to produce better-than-mass-market sound.(not just 'It was on sale!") It's NOT high-end, but it exists to fill a huge gap between that and BestBuy, for the sole purpose of better sound.(And market share. And profit.) High Fidelity, we call it, when what comes out is actually better than what should reasonably be expected. Synergy is how it all works together to give you more of whatever. But synergy is about more than just the sound that comes out, we often forget that the listener is the most important link in the chain. Without a listener, does the best gear in the world even make a sound?(to paraphrase) And each listener knows what sounds good to him/her, they have an idea of what they like, and maybe even why. Screw the gear, hi-fi is an individual quantification of an idea, the best sound someone ever heard, even if they can't really remember how it really sounded. Sonic memory, and stuff.
For some, a hi-fi is just a stack of expensive gear somebody else owns that "makes Lynerd Skynerd sound like yer right there in the bar with em!" I think that while these people hear music just fine, most of them don't really listen to it. Some of us, however, listen to music, we don't just hear it. And when you LISTEN to music, when you become truly interested in better rather than just new or different, you have to step up. It takes better gear. Like they say, "Different is easy, Better? Not so much."
When hi-fi becomes an idea, an IDEAL, the individual quest to quantify what (a)HI-FI should be or should sound like, it moves one into a new realm. One where realization of the ideal may be simply unachievable(economic reasons, maybe). There is a level of sound quality for most of us that we consider, individually, as being either high-fidelity or not, even if we don't know we're actually having that thought. And whether it's the gear, the sound quality, or the combination, our perceptions are usually based strictly on our level of expectation, and that usually based on experience, what we remember of something we saw and/or heard in the past. When we were actually paying attention, hopefully.
) it's that opinion of what constitutes a "night and day" difference varies widely. And, that my opinion of a big difference is firmly on the conservative side.
