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 ?
mahgister

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.   

@gkelly 

+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. 

I have learned that maxims and their corollaries, while they may be generally true, are rarely universally true.

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.

1. There are no absolutes.

2. Disappointment is the gap that exists between expectation and reality. --Maxwell