a rant

Pursuing high end audio is a very complex and ambiguous process. It requires successfully identifying the sound you like, sifting through marketing hype, evaluating equipment for sound, carefully choosing for the sound you want.

It is easy to get off track and follow marketing hype, poor reviews, other’s opinions.

I recommend, going and listening to live acoustic music. Apply your technical listening skills to characterize what you hear. Then go to high end shops and do general listing sessions to identify the kind of gear that is sounding what real music sounds like. Then read reviews of this equipment: Absolute Sound, Stereophile, and HIFI+ only. Do not read any of the other mags. Not that this mags aren’t infallible but they are relatively neutral. Then you need to make the correlation between what you hear from components and what reviewers say. Do not read marketing material on any components... it is completely unhelpful, as is the ASR site.

You need to use your ears to make the choices.

This is not a pursuit that is easy. But incredibly rewarding when you successfully navigate the many obstacles.

If you are not good at this analysis. Then find yourself a dealer that will carefully help you navigate all the alternatives. You have to interview and be interviewed by dealers to find one that gets you and what you are looking for and you get. There are actually many... but the ones simply out to sell give all a bad name. Typical medium sized shops, seek out the owner. Tell the story you posted. Find one that wants to be your guide.

Over the last fifty years I have slowly added a tubed piece of equipment after another until all my equipment is tubed. You can see my systems under my UserID. Tubed equipment took a hit in the '80s and has staged resergence since then because of its natural an musical sound. 

This is me -- with food.

After 30 years of being so enamored with restaurants - I am happy to just eat food. I’ve stopped looking for better food.
Whenever i have bought new brands or kinds of food it never tasted as good as people were telling me.
Maybe sometimes it did but most of the time, I was disappointed.
My over eager desires wanted every new morsel of food to taste incredible.

Now, I just eat the same things everytime, don’t think about its qualities, and don’t seek out any improvements.

Looking for something better is not as good as simply chewing and swallowing.

I have a $150 Fosi ZA3 and quite frankly, it sounds fantastic driving my Piega Coax 16s fed directly from my MSB Discrete DAC. Go figure...

I consider myself lucky to have been introduced to high end stereo in the 80's when there were brick and mortar stores aplenty in NYC. I got to listen to a wide variety of equipment and understand what I liked and didn't. Reviews didn't really have much impact upon me, I just knew what sounded good to me.

Fast forward to the 2010's when I finally had some money to spend, and knowing what I liked helped me obtain the system I always dreamed of (and buy it used).

Bob

I chased gear the first few years I was in the game in the early to later 80s...lots of amps, speakers, TTs, etc, but by 1989 I had acquired the same speakers, amps, and preamp I use now. It’s really been a matter of refinement since then...tube rolling, bi-amping, mods, configuration changes, etc. I don’t read reviews, don’t go into audio stores, and have a much slower, calculated approach to my next move than the early days. I also think the system sounds better than ever. It gets enjoyed more than ever too, but maybe the listener isn’t as picky as he used to be (though I doubt it! )