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BANG for the BUCK

For most of us it's all about value. Except for the relatively small number of folks who can afford not to worry about how much things cost.

For the rest of us it's all about the price/performance ratio. How much did you pay for what you got in terms of performance? The bang for the buck. I have found some excellent values over the years. And some terrible ones as well, alas. If we look at each class of components and various price points, what good and bad values have you experienced along the way? I'll give a few examples from my own experience to get this thread rolling. These examples are just for starters. They do not represent a complete list. If more come to mind I will add them to the thread later.

My caveat is that my comments are subjective and refer to my system -- and YMMV. I am only speaking for myself and my system here.

In the realm of DACS -- Antelope Gold, AMR DP, Berkeley 1 and EMM CDSA SE are in my price/performance dog house. My current NAD M51 takes the price/performance prize. It is the only DAC that has, so far, given me good value.

In the realm of speakers -- Merlin Monitors and Joseph Audio Pulsars represented good value for my system. But my current Raidho C1.1 monitors take the price/performance prize.

In the realm of cables, power products and power conditioners -- Gabriel Gold and Synergistic Research Tesla Series and Speaker Cells, Interconnect Cells and power conditioners are in my price/performance dog house. David Elrod and Shunyata cables, and the Shunyata Triton power conditioner take the price/performance prize.

In the realm of tweaks -- some of Jack Bybee's products, Schumann resonance devices and Audio Magic products take the price/performance prize.

How about you and your system? What stands out in terms of price/performance -- on both sides of the ledger?
sabai

Showing 2 responses by mapman

mapman's avatar
mapman
22,634 posts
 
What Doug said.

Price is easily quantified. Performance......not so easily. Its highly subjective. So there you go.

FWIW, I put my current rig with the big OHM F5 speakers in place with the goal of no compromise in performance but keeping budget to a minimum to accomplish. List for all the parts involved is between $15-20K. Buying used, on sale, applying trade-ins, it ended up costing me significantly less than that.
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,634 posts
 
One key to getting "bang for the buck" is to move forward in small, carefully planned increments. Look for things that appear to add clear value towards achieving your goals for reasonable marginal cost.

Worst thing to do is to just throw money at the problem or use cost/money as the measuring stick. IE, the more expensive option is necessarily the better one. Guaranteed you will overestimate what it actually costs to achieve your goals that way. Many tweaks that have the biggest impact cost next to nothing or nothing at all once the problems to address are well understood.
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