I'm increasingly fascinated by the number of threads that have been created lately by OP's who have joined over only the last 2 months with less than 30 posts that all seem related to the importance of wires and tweaks. While I'm not dismissing the notion that everything matters in hifi (including digital cable), it seems that these topics vastly overwhelm thread topics that clearly would have more influence to hifi audio sound such as discussions of the sonic characteristics of various amplifier topologies, the importance of simplifying the signal path, and identifying fantastic speaker/amplifier synergies, etc...
If some unsuspecting newbie were to stumble onto this forum they would likely come away thinking that a fuse or a piece of wire are the most important elements towards obtaining wonderful hifi sound. This is unfortunate. For example, my discovery of listening to a SET circuit years ago paired with speakers possessing a high and flat impedance greatly outshines any joy derived from identifying the finest digital cable produced by man. I'm simply questioning the hifi priorities that this forum seems to be obsessed with lately.
I've had mixed success with replacing stock AC cords. It had zero impact on my old Pass XA30.8 (even using a Purist Audio) but had a very notable improvement on my Sugden A21SE (I'm using an Audio Envy - under $200).
Installing a dedicated AC line was definitely a cost effective improvement for me as well - for ~$250 it was great to get that line isolated for audio gear.
I was blown away. I have heard a difference form a stock cord to just one very high end power cord. On an highly optimized system and the difference was substantial.
In addition my power cord theory was at least supported by the same author
" From the perspective of your audio components, the AC cord isn’t the last few feet of a transmission system, but the first few feet. The AC cord is directly connected to the primary windings in the power transformer of your audio component"
That’s the only thing that could make sense to me is that the power cord is an extension of the component not simply an "extension cord".
Also mentioned in the chapter was replacing all the cords as every component adds its own interference and you might not get the affect with only changing one.
My experience with replacing cords was positive but I only have two components an integrated amp and a DAC. The other side of that is I I’m really cheap (I mean really cheap). I purchased two Chinese power cords that were cheaper than buying the plugs and building them myself. What was important to me was wire gauge. The cords are rated at 10AWG. If I’d seen the 8AWG cables prior to that I probably would paid more for the extra conductivity.
Again my thoughts on cables were supported by the author for better plugs and increased wire gauge. " Good AC power-cord design minimizes the noise coupling between components described earlier, and ensures maximum instantaneous current delivery."
The cheapo 10AWG Amazon cables seem to make playback quieter and increased bass response. I’m not able to rewire my house but I’m currently using my sons power conditioner which may or may not have improved the sound but it gave me more plugs for all the other stuff and didn’t degrade the sound.
The cheapo that I am I trying to find a used medical grade power conditioner with enough amps to support my equipment. It’s out there in my price range hunting is the fun part.
I agree with your concept of sound per dollar. Is my system perfect? Nope never will be. For the money I have invested (not counting the myriad of amps, speakers and stuff to get here) is there another system that can touch it? I really don’t know don’t care. By doing a lot of research, listening to a lot of stuff doing a huge amount of comparison, for the first time in the 40 odd years I’ve been working with stereo I’m happy with the sound. With that foundation I can now work on tweaks.
I apologize for the novel but hopefully ... what was your question again?
Thanks for sharing your experiences @danager... exactly the type of input I'm so curious about. The roles and impacts of tweaks relative to entire system/room.
With that foundation I can now work on tweaks.
I totally agree with this. Get everything else optimized and then see what you can do to tweak out the remaining goodness - if available.
The last tweak that I made that really felt like it moved the needle was using isolation transformers ahead of my amps. Really effectively lowered the noise floor and didn't sound like it was choking the dynamics like other conditioners. It worked better than AQ Niagara and PS Audio regenerators. I'm using the Equi=Core combined with the Deep=Core. Makes the biggest difference with my tube amps...yet still notable with SS. On other components I can't really tell any incremental gains. I would say my overall sound quality moved up by at least 5% with this tweak so it was worthwhile.
I'd say for me that amp/speaker synergy is 65%+ of achieving the sound experience I'm looking for with at least 20% remaining in room acoustics/treatment/speaker positioning. Any remaining ~15% is a combo of tube rolling/isolation & vibration control/cables/isolation transformers. And yes, sound per dollar is exactly right.
Dana you should bring one of your cheapo PC over to compare with some of my old ones. Probably not that far apart on price but a lot better on performance I bet. If nothing else it will be useful to demonstrate the irrelevance of gauge. Amps has nothing to do with it. Both the ones you heard demo'd were the same gauge, the same amp rating, the same everything. Just not the same sound. Even the connectors cannot be judged that way. The ones you heard, the builder tried much more expensive connectors and didn't use them. They look real nice, they sure seem superior on paper. Only problem, they don't sound as good.
This is the crux of the whole thing. More or less a total waste of time to talk about "tweaks" as the word can mean anything. Leads to colossally wrong conclusions.
The biggest difference I can see so far is when people who know tweaks work, when they talk about tweaks they mean the ones that work. When someone wants to disparage tweaks or diminish their value they talk about obvious total garbage.
Harley said "many" tweaks are garbage- and then gave as an example a few tweaks that are total garbage. There really is no argument or dispute here. The question is what about the ones that are not only not garbage, but that work and work well?
A little apples to apples honesty will go a long ways here.
Some folks like that you know. Wiser to get to know better who you are dealing with first don’t you think, before you find yourself in an unanticipated adventure ?
Who knows, those expensive cables might have a use for which they are unintended, but pleasurable all the same, maybe more so. 🤭🤔😳
all the computer stuff not in a Faraday cage belongs on a pow con connected via dedicated line to the “ dirty “ leg of your panel. Computer includes switch mode power wall warts.
@kennyc is correct. I really need to refrain from letting MC drag me down to his level - a level that only exists in a vocabulary full of "butt hurt", "rent free", YouTube links, and "whatever". Honestly, what adult talks like that? His actions will create his own inescapable "brand" so I’m fine with stepping away and allowing him to live with the legacy documented in these pages. People are smart enough to see what’s going on - that’s for sure.
I’m very much encouraged by the input this thread is generating - lots of folks chiming in with their audio priority weightings. Thanks to all.
... for the first time in the 40 odd years I’ve been working with stereo I’m happy with the sound ...
I've seen comments like this before and it just amazes me. I really don't mean to sound disrespectful but just to be clear: You've been actively working at this for four decades and only now have been happy with the sound?!? That just boggles the mind.
I have been “actively been working at this” for 53 years. There are moments during that time where I have been happy with the sound. But “Happy” is a moving goal post.
I would say that within the last month that, thanks to the new room of 3 years and finally hitting the correct sub and main speaker placement last month, that my system made a giant leap and finally sounds the way it should.
People operate with constraints: budget, location, room, time. My constraint would be considered by others to be a blessing: a 2,000 sq ft loft for $1,000 a month in the middle of NoHo in lower Manhattan. It was a 41 year trade off: huge luxurious space in the heart of the greatest city in the world in exchange for a room with lots of sound reflections.
One could more precisely estimate bottom line value of fine tuning devices by removing every single one and compare. I'm not gonna do it. I've often done this when adding individual fine tuning device. Sometimes the addition of device is such that I couldn't go back to prior state. In that case, the device is invaluable. Add all the fine tuning devices together, becomes even more invaluable. I know I won't be removing my fine tuning devices.
It really has been 4 decades. YIKES! When I started I was chasing, learning and attempting to find the correct attributes with no real success. That was due to many factors space, knowledge and finances. I got to a point that music was no longer an enjoyable experience and all I heard was equipment. I boxed up the components that I thought were correct and put them in storage for two decades. From that point on I stopped chasing hi end and eventually just sufficed with an AV receiver and some JBL bookshelves on concrete blocks until about a half a decade ago. For the last 6 years now I have been learning and listening again. It kept sounding better but I never thought it was not much more than really good mid-fi.
Thanks to forums like this, stereo stores, craigslist and digital streaming I was able finally to get a system that to my ears checked all the boxes. I have enough new music to keep me interested in music and a sound system that plays it back with enough enjoyment that I rarely cringe anymore.
Everything is different now than it was 40 years ago. My music tastes, my hearing and my ability to research and afford the stuff I'm interested in.
It really isn't that mind boggling. I have still have friends from 40 years ago who have gone through a similar experiences of chasing the unobtainable and coming back to it with a different approach to get to their final destination.
I'm still going tweak stuff that's the hobby but I feel finally after over four decades feel the foundation is there.
I’m neither a newbie nor an expert, but someone who has appreciation and some good equipment. I agree with the comments about contentiousness vs. polite conversation — even if it involves disagreement. Things that polarize tend to get posted as people want to prove their points and Twitter and forums have given too much room for angry expression of opinion. My listening tweaks and getting to a priority usually has involved having the chance to a/b some things. That isn’t always easy because of costs and space sharing. A really odd-sounding room got me to look at room treatment so that became a priority. I randomly re-tried an amp and had forgotten how good it sounded, but not with the speakers I had, so speakers became a priority. My next listening space sounded amazing out of the box, so my priority became speaker placement. And vibration, and interconnects have been in the mix along the way. I find the wealth of experience and knowledge on the forum to be wonderful, useful, and inspiring, whenever the indignation is in check. And the search function lets me choose what to read.
I am 67 years old. The brain cells are dyin’ by the billions as I write this. By the time I finish this post I may be ready for assisted living.
I saw Jimi Hendrix perform at the midnight concert at the Fillmore East. That used to give me bragging rights. Now it just dates me.
But I digress: don’t take what I write literally. 😉
The guiding philosophy behind my choices have not changed over those 53 years. And I’m not at it all the time. I will go for stretches of 10 years here, 5 years there, where it’s f#*k it, good enough, just listen to the music please. And it has always been way better than anything my friends had. It came in great in the loft, we would have “The Loft” style parties twice a year: once at the end of the summer, and New Year's. We could pack 130 people in there.
I don’t go crazy over this audio stuff. I have excellent hearing, I do the best with what my wallet and my ethics allow me to do.
It’s 58 years of collecting LPs. That’s 6,000+ LPs. I have started the process of weeding out 600.
Just to be clear: I have been at this audio thing a long, long time, going all the way back to r.a.h-e days, and long before. But it did strike me odd that anyone could pursue audio for 40 years and only now be happy with the sound.
My system has improved a lot over the decades, but it’s always made me happy. That’s why I stay with it, and it’s also why I don’t play golf.
Those of you who may be interested in buying some of the 600 LPs that I am weeding out of my collection should contact me through my website, and ask me what you specifically are looking for.
My collection is 1/3: - classical - Afro Cuban - 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s rock’nroll-rock-acid-psychedelia-pop, Motown, blues, jazz, gospel, world, Latin folk, folk, country, bluegrass, country western, world, reggae, soukous, tango, Cajun, Native American, etc anything not hip hop or rap.
it's all about expectations and priorities. Was I ever happy with Sotify? It never sounded as good as my other digital sources but I used it for over a year until something better came along. I tried Tidal that wasn't it I never tried Qobuz but my initial research showed it like Tidal was light on the artists and music I listen to. Amazon Music came out and it took me over a year to figure out how to integrate it into my stereo and work the way I wanted it to. For a whole year I saw its potential but couldn't get it work to my satisfaction. That didn't make me very happy until it finally came together.
Same with amplifiers and even more so with speakers.
In my head I know the qualities I want from a system. It took some time but it finally came together for me. I have the ability to listen to almost anything that was ever recorded in a minimally compressed format that actually sounds good to me. To be honest I'm surprised it didn't take longer.
I’ve been listening to Scraping Fetus Off the Wheel for a little over an hour. Then the wife came home. I switched to some Mozart concertos. Life is good.
Since I’ve found the sweet spot for that sub, I have to say that I can’t imagine expensive cables making a damn bit of difference. I’m 95% to 98% there. It’s fine.
The sweet sauce is the semi anechoic room. It’s true what they say. The room is 40% or more. And it cost me only $2,000. I have my Cooper Union / Harvard trained architect and colleague and friend to thank fir that: C B Wayne.
@unreceivedogma Sotify is that music you buy from the Sot down the street that pirates 8 tracks.
I've done them all and who knew that the most fragile, hardest to store and most inconvenient would be the media that retained it's value. I will think of you every time I listen to an album (digitally) and don't have to get up every fifteen minutes to turn it over, clean it, de static it and make sure I place the needle down exactly and then carefully move away. Digital streaming is just like having a turntable with a stacker only better it turns the records over.
On another note your Karen Dalton pick was spot on. That would be a vinyl worth owning.
Late to this thread, so apologies if this has been mentioned, but the number of posts a member has made, or the length of time a person has been a member of Audiogon does not necessarily show whether that person is, or is not a “newbie”. It is possible that someone (like me) has been around this hobby for many years (decades!), and frequents this forum, but chooses not to comment too often. It is also possible that some folks who have been involved in this hobby for years haven’t felt compelled to ‘join’ Audiogon. I just wanted to point this out. I enjoy reading the forum, and I appreciate those members who contribute regularly (well, those who are helpful and constructive without being insulting), but usually I pop in after someone has made a comment similar to something I’d contribute, and I don’t see the need to be repetitive, so I don’t post. Another reason I keep my comments to myself is that there are people who just seem to enjoy being argumentative. I love a good argument, but I prefer mine face to face 😉. End venting.
I read somewhere that the act of pulling a record off the shelf, removing it from its sleeve, cleaning it, placing it on the turntable, clamping it down, dropping the needle on the groove and settling into the armchair is akin to making the bed before making love.
I’m not inclined to disagree.
As to the format with the most value, us vinyl types figured that would be the case all along. It just sounds better. And since few artists record in analog anymore, the LPs that are AAA (as opposed to ADA, or DDA), are becoming rarer and rarer. I can tell, without checking the liner notes, when an LP has been mastered or remastered digitally.
@tvad Thanks for lucid thoughts on this as always. If nothing else, the input on this thread over the past 4 pages validates your premise that far and away forum members are applying tweaks as tweaks - not expecting them to be the cornerstone of one’s system.
One of the more negative, and long-running aspects of the tweak threads is how they always tend to devolve into a "who is right?" argument. (Sometimes they don't devolve - they start right out of the gate guns-a-blazin’). It would be so refreshing just to simply share our experiences and allow all to absorb and consider - as opposed to taking a position to "argue". It seems years ago that Audiogon had more of a spirit of comradery. Now some posters just resort to name-calling, Youtube-linking, and use of a 12 yr-old’s codes for shaming as a method of showing dominance in a discussion. Hopefully we will see this behavior dissipate and we all take individual ownership of making this a better place by acting more friendly. This is certainly my intention.
The controversy around priorities and putting topics like cables and floating the cables on little feet etc in their proper context with corollary importance (or lack thereof) and to what degree complexity lends itself to obfuscation rather than understanding reminds me of a scandal from the 1990s that occurred in the upper echelons of cultural theory.
Alan Sokal, a professor at NYU and London’s University College, submitted an article to “Social Text”, an academic journal of postmodern cultural theory (that I also happened to read myself from time to time). His submission was meant to test the journal’s intellectual rigor, and to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies - whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Frederick Jameson and Andrew Ross - would publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it sounded good and if it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions."
The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the journal’s spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars” issue. It proposed that “quantum gravity” is a social and linguistic construct. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine “Lingua Franca” that the article was a hoax.
The “Sokal Affair” - as it came to be known - caused controversy about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of “Social Text”; and whether “Social Text” had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor.
At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.
Needless to say, peer review and the analytical discipline that accompanies it is nowhere near to being A Thing in audio. Is it any wonder that audiophiles rarely agree on much?
My peer reviewed post re quantum entanglement was deleted by the mod. Now, Most people don’t think of Jack Daniels as an accomplished Quantum physicist, but in our household he is chair of the Dept.
Who would sit on this audio peer review board, and what form would this analytical analysis take? I don't think audiophiles will ever accept any appointed or elected audio peer review board in the near future. There is so little commonality between individual systems, highly likely each system is totally unique on this earth. And then there is my individuality to account for, I may interpret what I hear differently than some expert. I highly doubt mass audiophile agreement to some audio board's determination of some instrument measured and/or double blind or some other iteration of so called objective listening tests that rates audio equipment in hierachy of sound quality. There may be a day when acceptance of some instrument measured audio sound performance hierarchy will be accepted by the masses. I'm sure some outliers will continue to decide for themselves, at least until the audio police confiscate their equipment or place the outliers in audio reformatories where accepted norms of sound quality are inculcated. I think most of us are quite content to freely build our own audio systems and interpret it's sonic performance based on our individual perceptions. And so, argument in the audio realm really not need take place if the above subjectivity kept in mind. Self appointed judges who'd be more than happy to sit on these peer boards would love to send me to audio re-education camps.
@ sns: my bad if I implied that we need a “peer reviewed audio board” process. I meant to suggest the opposite: that subjectivity reigns in a field that claims to have higher standards of critical thinking than what reigns in the audio world, so why don’t we just agree to disagree and get on with audio - rather than as an end in itself, but instead with what it’s all supposed to be designed for, enjoying the music itself?
Don't be so serious... If ya' like it, like it. If ya got the bucks, spend the bucks. Let freedom ring. Or is that being clanged with jackhammer treble and getting stomach-punched with overbearing bass? Then again, maybe we could avoid the agony with AM-style fuzz & compression.
I'm sure there are a large number of experienced members who seldom post now because of all the vitriol spewed around. It never used to be like this , I remember avidly reading new posts of interest and looking forward to the next Thursday's Weekly recap. Not so much anymore.
When the internet was young people's communication was a lot more civilised than today where the assimilation of a familiar anonymity behind a computer keyboard provides a shield from a well deserved punch in the mouth.
I can not comprehend why the Audiogon mods don't weed out the worst offenders who post here not to help and advise but to get kicks out of destroying, insulting and being as rude as possible. You guys know who you are and should be ashamed. It's telling that non of the
obnoxious
members have posted on this very thread. If they can't shout snake oil or scam or whatever they are powerless.
There are also the arrogant and unappreciative lot who after you have taken the time to provide info pertinent to their question do not even bother to reply to you, not even a 'that's interesting' if they disagree or think you've lost your mind.
@OP, to address your post, hifi priorities will drift around but the vastly underestimated room treatment will remain top for me.
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