Just before Christmas, we bought a new television.

Now, this is not something we do often. We are not “TV people” in the sense of chasing the latest panel technology, obsessing over specifications, or upgrading every few years because something newer has come along. We buy a new television when the old one is, for want of a better word, shagged. When it is clearly on its last legs and showing obvious signs of distress. This one was!

In this case, our old television had developed a very strong blue cast. Everything looked like it had been filmed underwater, or during some sort of particularly bleak Scandinavian winter, with a blue filter. No amount of fiddling with settings seemed to cure it. Linette tried. She really did. Menus were explored, sliders were fiddled with, and presets were tested. Nothing helped. The telly had decided it was done.

Even under normal circumstances, I have very little to do with televisions beyond watching what appears on them. Operating a modern one remains something of a mystery to me. Turning it on successfully is often the best I can muster. During the brief period in 2024 when Lin was back in the UK for a few days, my mornings were spent fighting with remotes and input settings. Most days ended with me sending her a message asking what I had done wrong and how I could fix it. She would reply, usually politely, occasionally with real concern for my mental well-being.

So when it came to choosing a new television, my contribution was minimal. My involvement stretched to one useful sentence: “A fifty-five-inch screen will fit the space.” Beyond that, I was largely a passive observer. Lin did the research. Lin made the decisions. Lin pressed the buttons.

The television arrived. The old one was driven out to Emmaus . The new one was unboxed – i got involved in that bit. We stood back. Tadaaaa.

Nothing.

It was dead. Not resting. Not sleeping. It had not gone the way of the Norwegian Blue parrot. It was bleeding demised. Back into its box it went, and off it went again, never to darken (quite literally) our living room a second time.

A replacement arrived on Christmas Eve. I did the heavy lifting. Lin did the setting up. There is a pattern here, and readers will have spotted it already.

And then, over the festive period, we watched a fair amount of television. More than usual, certainly. Series finales on Netflix. A handful of familiar films that happen along every Christmas, whether you want them or not. Quiz shows escaped their usual Monday night slot and seemed to be on every evening. The holy trinity of Only Connect, Mastermind, and University Challenge (or as we tend to call it, Universally Challenged) was taking over. By the turn of the New Year, I was all quizzed out.

But something else had been nagging at me as we sat there night after night, staring at our new, very nice television. Something that I could not quite put my finger on at first.

The picture quality was too good.

I am not saying it was bad. Quite the opposite. It was pin-sharp. Bright. Detailed. Every pore, every thread of fabric, every bead of sweat rendered in extraordinary clarity. It is a 4K panel with all the tiny LED wizardry that modern televisions now boast. From a technical standpoint, it is impressive.

And yet, I found it oddly odd. 

Everything felt hyperreal in a way that made it feel less real. Actors appeared strangely detached from their surroundings, as if they had been cut out and pasted onto the background. Movement felt unnatural. Smooth in places, jerky in others. Digital. I was constantly aware that I was watching something contrived, rather than something “real”.

What struck me most was that, with our old, lower-fidelity television, I believed the illusion far more easily. I could believe that Elliot and ET were in a real bedroom. I could accept the make-believe world being presented to me as being real without question. It had been a spectacle, but now it was something different. Something alien.

Now, with all this added clarity, everything looks like what it actually is. A set. A backdrop. A carefully lit arrangement of walls that do not really go anywhere. The magic trick is exposed. I can’t be on my own in having noticed this.

Some of the sets look alarmingly flimsy. Flat. Painted. Almost amateurish. At times, it feels like watching a school stage production where the backdrops have been knocked up by the less artistically inclined pupils. Lighting, too, seems oddly artificial. That fashionable backlighting used to separate people from the background now screams artifice rather than subtlety. People glow in a way that no one ever does in real life. Back To The Future looked to be exactly what it was: a film created on sets. Doors looked flimsy and painted to look real. Books on shelves were clearly two-dimensional backdrops. Ghostbusters looked even worse!

I find myself distracted by it all. Instead of being absorbed in the story, I am noticing edges. Noticing seams. Noticing the trick…the illusion.

And this got me thinking, as these things tend to do.

In audio, we have spent decades chasing ever higher levels of fidelity. Higher sample rates. Greater bit depth. Cleaner measurements. Lower noise floors. More information. Always more information. Higher-HiFi. Hi-Def-HiFi?

For some listeners, this is unquestionably a good thing. They love the extra detail, the sense of hearing deeper into a recording. They (and I) talk about transparency, resolution, and accuracy. They want to hear everything.

For others, this relentless pursuit of fidelity is precisely (perhaps) the problem. They talk about digital sheen. Digital brightness. A lack of cohesion. A feeling that the music has been pulled apart into its constituent parts rather than presented as a whole. Many of these people gravitate towards analogue, whether that is vinyl, tape, or simply a certain way of voicing digital equipment.

This article is not meant to pour petrol on that particular fire. I am not interested in reigniting the analogue versus digital debate here. That road is well-worn and usually ends in raised voices and entrenched positions, much in the way that Cable Wars ignite.

What I am interested in is the idea that more fidelity might not necessarily mean more belief…perhaps.

Very few records leave the studio untouched. Performances are edited. Takes are comped. Timing is nudged. Pitch is corrected. Effects are added. Ambience and space is constructed, often in the digital domain. What we hear is almost always a carefully assembled version of reality rather than a documentary capture of it.

At lower levels of resolution, some of that artifice is smoothed over. The joins are less obvious. The illusion holds.

As fidelity increases, we may be hearing more of what is on the recording, but that includes hearing more of the process. More of the scaffolding. More of the decisions that were made along the way. At some point, does increased clarity stop drawing us into the performance and start reminding us how it was built?

This does not mean that high fidelity is wrong or misguided. Far from it. But it does raise an interesting question, or I thought it did. Are we always getting closer to the music, or are we sometimes just getting closer to the machinery that made it?

The same question applies to that new television sitting in our living room. It is undoubtedly better by any measurable standard. And yet, I find myself missing the softer focus of the old one, if not the blue cast. The way it let my imagination and brain fill in the gaps. The way it allowed me to believe the lie without constantly pointing at the wires holding it up.

Perhaps there is a sweet spot, both in audio and video, where enough information is presented to engage us fully, but not so much that the illusion collapses under its own weight.

Or perhaps this is simply me getting old and grumpy, muttering about how things were better when they were worse.

Either way, it has reminded me that fidelity is not an end in itself. What matters is not how much information we can extract from a recording or an image, but how convincingly it draws us into another world. How much we connect with the music on an emotional level. How far the illusion captivates and draws us in. 

And sometimes, a little less clarity makes that world feel a lot more real. At least where televisions are concerned.

I hope I’ve made myself clear. 

Stu

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