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.
What sounds good to you is what matters. Your ears don’t lie.
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...
