I am fairly new to this journey and every time I dump a chunk of change into my system, I am completely overwhelmed by the amount of change I am experiencing. I have terrible whataboutism. Every time I purchase something it’s hard for me to comprehend how it is going to sound better because my system sounds so good as it does now. Yet here I am today making a new speaker purchase around an hour ago. Now I get the next two weeks waiting for a delivery with crippling whataboutism. I guess what I’m saying is I’m early enough in this journey that anything I throw at the fan…
A principle guiding the wise audiophile life
There is one law, or best said a principle, guiding the wise audiophile life :
What matter is not the gear pieces price or his design, it is up to our budget limit to pick the right stuff for ourselves and our needs.
What matter is the way we installed together the mechanical,electrical and acoustical working dimensions of any chosen system/room...
As a consequence of this principle this is his corollary:
The mechanical electrical and acoustical controls,devices,tweaks, parameters, cannot be replaced by one another if we want to reach an optimal result in sound quality.
Vibrations/resonance controls cannot replace or be replaced by acoustics parameters controls or EMI shielding and grounding for example.
The greatest error we can do is buying and just "plug and play". Then upgrading a piece part by frustration or dissatisfaction, without learning how the whole system may,must,can behave in a specific room for our specific ears (psycho-acoustics).
The other error will be to cure one problem with a gear upgrade before trying to understand what is the problem.
This must be meditated by any beginners before "upgrading" and after "upgrading"...
There is no relation between a piece of gear or a system/room before and after his optimal mechanical,electrical and acoustical installation. None.
It is the reason why reviews do not tell all the truth there is to be tell ...
This resume what i have learned.
What have you learned yourself ?
52 responses Add your response
gkelly It is normal if you begin with a good amount of money to try anything there is... Enjoy it... I lived trough the same thing with probably less money to invest though a long time ago... My best wishes to you ... |
I have long come to the conclusion that audiophilia is a complex system of music, gear and listener in an environment. The result we get is a unique combination of innumerable factors coming together in an unpredictable way. If we upgrade a component, we may well be able hear an improvement. However, the effect of the change soon becomes the new norm. In the longer term, does it really make a significant difference? Do we truly enjoy music any more than we did previously? Not necessarily, in my view. Yet, I still try. |
newton_john Thanks for your interesting post... I will just observe that any change in my system was always traceable to a cause... I know only four causes,if i except our subjective variable hearing mood: gear design improvement by upgrade and a modification in the three working dimensions of any system/room.
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I've learned two most important principals. However, the first precept was not so much learned as it was already an adopted axiom. First and foremost, ALWAYS trust your ears! It matters not what others' ears prefer or like. YOU are the one who needs to be pleased or impressed and live with the decison(s) you make. Lastly, in order to achieve, not just a small, immediately discernible improvement in sound quality but that proverbial wow factor, the expense is exponential. In other words, GENERALLY SPEAKING, two-thousand-dollar speakers will sound better than one-thousand-dollar speakers. However, if you want that wow factor, plan on spending at least three times as much and, from there, the exponents increase for the wow factor. |
+1 I am not new to this pursuit, over fifty year. But I learned early on that carefully investing more would always result in exceeded expectations. While my tastes have evolved, intense research, knowing what sound quality you want, then investing 2x or more always results in exceeding expectations. There is virtually no end to this. You can improve sound quality by careful choice, setup and financial investment. Nothing exceeds doing all three. |
For me, the greatest difference has come from learning to measure my room’s RT60, impulse response, and frequency curves using REW software and a UMIK-1 microphone. Understanding and then addressing these fundamental room acoustics has been transformative. Compared to these significant factors, specific vibration control for speakers has yielded the most obvious, albeit smaller, audible improvements. However, I’ve noticed almost no discernible difference from electrical adjustments, largely because I’ve never had issues with hum or buzz, nor from other forms of vibration control on components other than speakers. Indeed, outside of the larger factors mentioned, swapping gear has lead to the greatest amount of new information for me. It is MUCH more of an impact to change or upgrade an amplifier to get a better match with the speakers than to spend much time on electrical tweaks and adjustments. P.S. I've learned to NOT trust my ears too much. Often, I find myself satisfied with the sound of my system and, if I take the time to measure it and discover (for example) a peak in an important frequency range, correcting that makes the sound even better. So, I guess I trust my ears in the end, but I don't trust them without some skeptical testing and re-listening. |
Audiophilia reminds me of dating or what I remember of it in my distant, puerile youth. I used to shell out more money than I had to wine and dine prospective girlfriends in college. There were always "performance" surprises both good and bad and most often unexpected. It was always difficult to judge "equipment" until it arrived at home and was unboxed, and by then it was too late to take countermeasures if necessary, nor would you ever get your money back. A good male friend of mine in college once developed a crush on a woman and commenced to wooing her. On the second date after dinner they wound up on the beach at night whereupon they commenced hanky-panky to the sound of the waves. It was then that my friend discovered an unexpected part in the box in the form of the male appendage. Normally, an extra, free part would be cause for jubilation; but in this instance it was met with shock and awe. My friend was able to laugh at it all eventually and even became good friends with the "amplifier" though not at the level of tinkering. Everything is a sort of hobby, and then we die. If we die even a little bit happy for whatever reason and by whatever means, then we have had our revenge. Myself, I intend to die with a smile on my face even if it is a very faint smile. |
I have a cousin who worked for OSHA all over the country and one of his stints landed him in The French Quarter. Being a local, he could spot the he-shes and he always got a kick at a club or bar watching visitors while away the time wooing one. It wasn't until their hand made its way up the skirt that they came to grips with gender fluidity, so to speak. All the best, |
This is pretty basic stuff. The OP wants to convince everybody that you can buy a $500 amp but put a $10 worth of isolation feet on it, it will perform like the $60,000 amp. You know this isn’t possible. Most of the experience audio people know the facts of room dimensions, diffusion and absorbing panels on all 1st reflective points, system synergy, clean electrical power, isolation, on and on. Cheap components in a good room will sound like cheap components, but a quality 6 digit system in a bad room will make the system sound like a $500 Sony. Most audiophiles know they need to do their homework before buying the first piece of audio equipment. This has been stated in many other forum threads on agon, I’m just restating the obvious that has been said before: If building a home, The room needs to be built first with the correct dimension. I know people that have had the professional people build the room that cost many tens of thousands of $$$. Power requirements, I have had many dedicated 20 amp circuits put in my custom audio room. Overkill, not really, so cheap before drywall is installed. Then you have diffusion and absorption panels placement. Now you can go out and start gathering info, attending audio shows to get a feel for what’s out there. Joining an audio club will also give you insight into what’s your buddies are using and how it sounds. most of us went the cheap route decades ago mainly that’s all we could afford. The more you make the more you can spend on audio gear. Now for me, I buy quality gear, the best for my room and for my ears. This goes for my main system and 2nd and 3rd systems in the house. For good stuff it takes money. For example in my 2nd system, my speakers cost $15k and they sound very good, but there are much better speakers at much more money that would require a bigger room which I don’t have available |
@p05129 +1. Well stated. There are no perfect components, every design incorporates compromises. Better equipment means the ceiling for your system is higher, you have greater potential. A room with poor acoustics will surely prevent even a superbly designed system from getting close to its potential. Paying attention to acoustics allows equipment to perform at a level much closer to its ceiling. No amount of acoustic improvements, however, can raise that ceiling or overcome the compromises inherent in the design or parts used in the equipment-that can't happen because the limitations are baked in. I agree with @ghdprentice that truly significant increases in equipment quality usually means better sound and more money. Certainly, there are poorly designed pieces that cost more and less expensive equipment that delivers nice value. Its great that we live in a time where you can construct a really satisfying system without spending an inordinate amount of money. Even so, the adage that you usually get what you pay for turns out to be true. I recently saw a comment to a YouTube video touting cheap gear wherein this fellow declared that his $5,000 speakers would perform as well as ANY $50,000 speakers. My first thought was, how did he find time to listen to all those speakers? My next thought was, if that was true, there would be no $50,000 speakers. We can all be too competitive about audio. There is no "best" system. The real deal is putting something together within our respective means that gets you to a joyful place with the music. That place is different for all of us. |
@newton_john - we have a similar problem about the music...her tastes are much more encompassing of what I as a certified music snob look down my nose at, however there is a good bit that we share and we do...she prefers to do her listening while driving. While I prefer to drive in silence and concentrate on staying alive while every other car on the road seems hell-bent on taking me out either on purpose or through inattention. So I listen a lot at home at relatively low levels and she listens in the car...we do however enjoy movies and the home theater equipment gives us common ground to share equally. It works. Our tastes in program material for movies overlap enough there is seldom any battle. |
@p05129 I agree with a lot you say, but I have also found that some of these premium brands are just premium because they include the audiophile tax...Which is all to liberally applied via the marketing department of the companies guilty of such egregious acts and willingly paid by those who because they cannot discern being taken for a ride willingly chip in and become that company's most recent mark. I stubbornly take the position that if its not an audible difference then it is not a difference that matters unless it has to do with ease of use or basic functionality. I make the argument, that for me at least, discerning the difference between a 500 dollar DAC and a 50k dollar DAC is not something I can perceive with all my senses on high alert. Is this more a reflection of admitting my advancing age and subsequent inability to hear what some 30-something can hear? Well maybe it is...and if so that is to my advantage to be able get to that sweet spot with my system by spending a heck of lot less money. I'll happily make that trade. Money doesnt grow on trees where I live so being sensible and pragmatic is necessary. This is the same argument that my best friend makes about drinking scotch. He's happy with $30 scotch and thankful his palate doesnt demand the pricier stuff. I submit that this illustrates what the argument is...Everyone draws a line in the sand based on their ears, and their income for what level they must have to feel some sense of satisfaction. Everybody draws that line in a different place. As I replace the pieces in my house that were lost to the fire, I will buy what I think is the best I can get to meet the need and want within the budget allotted. Especially in the area of speakers chosen. This will be my end game system...simply because of where I am in my life. Will it be the best I have ever had? Who knows? I'm starting from scratch so there are going to be mistakes made, in fact there already have been. I'm trying very hard not to make more. |
First I would advice to read Robert Harley audio book. It did help me the rest I did it it one my own like listening skill. After I learned how to match my system then final tweak made me slow down in buying anymore stuff. Money matters in this hobby not always. This year I went to axpona to listen to a $125k set up it sounded very good after I went to a friend house to listen to listen to his $22k system? The difference is not much at all. |
This is why I will never use rock on their server or on mine. If I’m wrong, can you tell me how much cpu usage % while running? Are you swapping/paging? How much of the mEmory are you using? Any disk/ssd errors? Ethernet/network errors? I have close to 4TB of music on my server. I’m using Mint Linux for Roon and I have hundreds of diagnostic commands and tools to see exactly what is going on in the OS. I’ve ran Roon on OSX for years and I also had many diagnostic tools/commands to diagnose any problem I might have. The OP and many others for years have reported problems they were having and most posters indicate that they think upgrading to the bigger server is what needed. This could be a foolish move because you don’t know what is causing the problem. |
I presume you are a remote viewer of a palm reader ? If you are you read my mind in a distorted way.... i always specified that basic optimization is only that : basic optimization principle which apply to any system at any price... Only an idiot will think that price never reflect the design quality of a piece of gear than a better potential performance...I am not this one idiot... only an idiot will claim that price is all there is to know about the gear before plug and play ... I am not this one idiot... Read others mind ... Thanks... only an uninformed person will also claim :
Now after accusing me of repeating common place facts you yourself impose on us your "axiom" which is the most erroneous one peddled in all audio thread... Sorry but optimizing a system /room is very complex job with his 3 working dimensions and buying costly acoustics panels do not replace acoustics controls ( complex one as filters or mechanical one as mine) and knowledge... Buying is not enough... And yes a low cost system can be relatively good when the designed parts are good and when they reach their optimum even if no peanuts cost system can replace very costlier one.... Am i in the obligation to repeat this in each post because a twisted mind reader will put falseties in my mouth ? |
To be clear i will repeat this :
There is no relation between a piece of gear or a system/room before and after his optimal mechanical,electrical and acoustical installation. None.
This does not means that my 150 bucks dac will rival a many thousand bucks dac, nor that my 1000 bucks system will make Mike Lavigne or ghdprentice envious... Is it clear enough for those who claim to read my mind ?
I hope so....
It does means however that any well optimized system can beat relatively costlier one IF they are not well optimized... It does means that for sure any low cost system even well optimized cannot beat a well optimised costlier system most of the times. because there is a justification for a higher cost price corresponding to a best design most of the times... |
Another fact: We live an era of luck for audiophile...
We can afford very low cost gear with a minimal satisfaction acoustic threshold. My actual system is very good for his peanuts price ... All low cost chinese, save one vintage from japan, but 2 German vintage headphones... I had 4 conditioners / purifier/ clean power reserve. 8 homemade grounding box, 2 Schumann generators, many homemade Helmholtz resonators in my acoustic corner/room and one linear power supply serving three gear pieces. Peanuts costs and very good for what it is ... I am happy with it, even if better exist, i learned how to install any system at any cost, but i bought vwhat i could afford...i am proud to have been able to learn acoustics concepts... Acoustics panels are good enough for a living room but acoustics ask for more knowledge than just buying them...Thats my point...
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If somebody has never been able to create at low cost a RELATIVELY good system/room , i am pretty sure he will not be able to optimize any costlier system too... Why ? Because the three working dimensions to optimize are the same for any system at any cost...
For sure there is at some level of price differences... Using an acoustician to design a room dont compare to my mechanical tuning of a room...I did with what i have, the acoustician architect will create something new... I hope no one will distort my message .... |
a very important observation:
If we divide audio for the sake of my argument in three categories(without specifying a price because it is not my goal to start a useless arguing here):
----Low-fi or very low cost products, ----Mid-fi ---- High-fi or much costlier design
it is very hard to optimize a low cost system to sound relatively well or good... it appears, compared to low fi , even unnecessary to optimise mid-fi gear compared to low cost one because it sound way more good sometimes without apparent need of any optimization... But, and this is my point, very high end gear need to be optimized as much as low cost gear, mechanically, electrically but especially acoustically to reach his peak working performance .... Ask Mike Lavigne who know a bit about optimization and High -fi gear...
Then some people with mid-fi laugh at any effort to optimize the gear especially because they purchase mid-fi costlier gear plug and play and the sound can beat in quality even some low cost gear even after his optimization.... ( as an example a magnepan speakers in a living room can beat most low cost speakers even well optimized one...) This explain why some audiophile can laugh if i spoke about Schumann generators or vibrations controls at low cost... As i said every system. low-fi,mid-fi,high-fi, need to be optimized...it is just less evident with mid-fi when we upgrade from low-fi.... Ignorance always laugh ( at the expanse of others)...
The wise smile ...
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Optimizing means everything matters. And if this not true, tell me what doesn't matter? Some things matter less but they still matter. For instance I don't know how operating systems for streamers became part of this discussion, but for Roon optimization this is important, I run Euphony OS on custom server, using less than 1% on 7 cores of cpu, cpu usage important for sound quality. So here we have another example of how even the seemingly miniscule things do matter. |
I did try JPlay on an iPad with dBpoweramp Asset as an alternative to Roon. I thought it sounded slightly better. It's claimed to do so because there's less traffic on the network. It's cheaper, too. Unfortunately, I couldn't use it because it didn't play gapless with my Linn DSM. I am hoping that one day Linn will make the DSM compatible with JPlay. |
Don’t try try to establish your own priorities when approaching music reproduction at home for others.. Convenience, form factor, physical contraints, budget, flexibility, complexity, esthetics, leveraging their investment, space planning for the room, etc. are ALL valid considerations for "non-audiophiles." Getting the lower midrange "right" may be #42 on their list of what’s important. Example: I, literally, cannot give away "good examples" of vintage audio gear to my grandkids that I’ve set aside in safe keeping or them for decades. |
"So the five o'clock shadow and Adam's Apple didn't give it away? Not that hard to tell the difference between a rooster and a cat." This was the early 70's, and we were about 18 years old. No one was much thinking about Adam's Apples back in those days. These depicted below were my first dorm room speakers: Zenith "Circle of Sound" Speakers My mother bought these for me probably because her father was always going on about the high quality of Zenith TV sets. Simpler times all around. My dominant recollections of those days were ones of befuddlement and anxiety. Every night in my dorm bed I would listen to a vinyl recording of "nature sounds" from somewhere in the countryside - crickets and a faint sound of a dog barking at the next farm over sort of thing in a vain attempt to fall asleep. I used to hang on to my dinky little system for dear life, but without the slightest notion of "audiophile." It was all about psychological survival by whatever means were at hand. Then I made a college friend who opened the door for me. This guy had a fairly advanced reel-to-reel sound system. He said "Here, smoke this," and then he told me to lie down and put some Koss headphones on me and fired up Cat Stevens' "Tea For the Tillerman" album. "Ok," I said to myself after floating back down to Earth. "Now I see."
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Interesting story! Bare minimum audiophilia for survivalist in hard reality... It remind me of my actual bliss under the blanket at 13 years old with the first small transistor radio... Music quiet my fears...
I like your last paragraph especially :
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My understanding of the OP's comments is that no matter what you have, you should optimize it. You optimize it individually and you optimize it in relation to everything else in the environment. I believe you should always start with the room because you don't want a speaker that is too big or too small for the room. Once you decide on the speaker, you then need to place it appropriately relative to listening position and you should consider isolating it mechanically. There should be some acoustic treatment and the signal you feed to it should be as pure as possible. You should go through every component in your room and see whether or not you've optimally matched it to other components and that you have optimized it mechanically, electrically, and acoustically. |
It takes about 6 months for speakers to get broken in to sound their best. The room you place your system in is as important as the components you have picked for your system. What matters most, is you like the sound of your system. 5 years ago I purchased an integrated Primaluna, built my own speakers and love the sound of my system. Could it be better? Of course, if I want to nit pick. Perfection is an opinion, not a reality in Audio reproduction. There is a fine line between, "how much better per $1000 will be worth the cost." For those with deep pockets, well go for it. For me, listening before I purchased maximized the dollars I spent. I had about 100hrs in my speakers before I said, this is what I want. Perfect? For my dollars spent, for me it's darn close. |
This hobby attracts a lot of people with OCD tendencies — chasing perfection where it doesn’t exist. But sound is simple. It’s just waves. If you like what you hear, you win. There is no “better.” That concept doesn’t exist. There’s just sound and music — and music is life. It's good for your brain and your soul. Repeat after me: There is no better. Chi-fi gear is excellent. DACs under $100 are excellent. Class D amps under $500 are excellent. Technology has made great sound more accessible than ever. I own a $50,000 setup — and I’ll be the first to tell you, it’s mostly a farce. My $800 desktop setup sounds really good. Trust your ears, not the forums. Not the reviews. Not the price tags. There is no better. |
I like your post. Once this is said you forget something speaking mainly about the gear choices and prices...
There is better in this hobby than the gear subjective or objective measures and evaluation or price...There is the learning about acoustics concepts and the way we can perceive them as phenomenon...There is the learning experience about the electrical and mechanical working dimensions ... There is better than low-fi,mid-fi,high-fi, defined by price...yes...There is system/room/Ears/brain optimized and experimented with and trained... There is better than my pair of ears... It is when i train my ears with acoustics parameters i train myself to perceive by experiments (Not just by buying different pieces of gear, because buying is not training) there is better than any piece of gear , there is better than any system/room, once they are optimized, there is no relation between before and after...
You are right our ears dont lie but they cannot separate truth from illusion about our system/room without being educated they can be deceived easily if they are not trained by acoustics experiments... We must trust our ears if we want to train them but it is our brain and mind which guide us not our ears biases. If i tune a room or a piano i trust my ears but because i had learned how to train them to begin with... 50 years ago i trusted my ears thinking that my Tannoy dual gold were top of the world and i owned them 40 years but i never really heard them in their real optimal peak because i never learned how to put them in this state...They were the best speakers i ever owned by design but i never hear them ... Trusting our ears before purchasing a piece of gear which will be heard by us in different conditions and in a different system in a show room is not enough and may be deceiving even if we buy a good product like my Tannoy which i thought was perfect as they are without any need of optimization...... Our ears will not lie to us as a non trained child who is unable to perceive some phenomena above his head dont lie but create his own reality. Nothing bad here. But in audio it is way more interesting if we learn how to improve our system and then if i can optimize a system i can make apparent the differences between a 50,000 system and a 800 bucks one (the price of my system is low cost near 1000 and sound more than just good but give me 50,000 and i will improve it way over his actual potential because i know how to do it ) I appreciate and i like the fact though that you minimize the difference between a 1000 and 50,000 bucks system. Most people associate S.Q. not with optimization but with upgrading. It is the cardinal sin of audiophile circle... They buy and call it learning... What i call learning is experiments... |
That’s the irony of hifi - it’s perfectly possible to thoroughly enjoy music on the cheapest of systems. Does that completely invalidate what audiophiles do? I guess we’re all going to take different views on that. There are no right or wrong answers to this question. On a similar note, my wife once posed the question to a musician friend, "Why does my husband sit trying to coax a tune out of the kids' toy guitar when he's got an expensive hand-built instrument." |
