A principle guiding the wise audiophile life
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. |
