John Atwood's High Fidelity

Hi-fi became a generic term, to some extent displacing phonograph and record player in the 1950. People would like to play record on the hi-fi rather than playing it on the phonograph. But the technology of high fidelity sound reproduction is at its heart a cheat, and the idea is to imitate the sound of a concert hall which fake the reality of a live performance and fool the human ear. In High Fidelity, Rob, the main character, and his cohorts, fidelity means more than faithfulness to sound quality; it means faithfulness to music as art, as spiritual experience, as religion, as life itself. The title of the novel shows going much deeper than just technological considerations.
Rob is around his middle-aged and owns a record store, but he has
Rob says “Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.” It is obvious that Rob has known there are some bad relationship with Laura. So, he tries to learn why, he visits each of his ex-girlfriends on his top five lists to discover the reasons. After that, Rob discovers he has a crippling fear of commitment, he was always oblivious to their needs and he acted emotionally instead of rationally.

However, in the novel, Rob and his cohorts uncovers the worth in them as they find it in themselves, and then they finally find some success in life, love, and music. Here, as in real life, pop music is a poison snake, a haven for those who feel misunderstood or ignored, a place where someone else understands what we feel, both at our highest and at our lowest; but also an emotional trap as powerful as your parents’ basement, a place to hide from the real world of real emotions too complicated for a pop