No. in fact substandard equipment may not only mask differences but reverse what ought to be the true outcome. The dumbest things ever are the folks who compare some $20k speaker to a $2k speaker on youtube. yea, after compression, jitter, conversion in the laptop, and playing through the 1" speaker i ought to be able to discern the deltas. Uh, huh.
OK, now on the the caveats. Don’t confuse cheap with poor quality, or expensive with good. There are many cheap components i really like, and many costly components that i find somewhere between uninspired and plain bad. Some of those quite famous too.
Its worth mentioning that there are some modestly inexpensive reference quality speakers out there. By and large they accomplish this magic through a) good engineering and b) an almost total lack of bass. So, if you *know* they lack bass, and account for it, then sometimes you can make valid comparisons....within boundaries.
But at the end of the day, revealing is revealing. I had one prototype that i was pretty satisfied with in my downstairs and lab systems, and which several audio folks with good ears pronounced darned good at the price. ...Then i took it "upstairs".... and the truth came out :-) It was good but had its limits. I bit the bullet and made the changes i wanted to all along and now it truly sings. Maybe some day it will even see the light of the market.
G
OK, now on the the caveats. Don’t confuse cheap with poor quality, or expensive with good. There are many cheap components i really like, and many costly components that i find somewhere between uninspired and plain bad. Some of those quite famous too.
Its worth mentioning that there are some modestly inexpensive reference quality speakers out there. By and large they accomplish this magic through a) good engineering and b) an almost total lack of bass. So, if you *know* they lack bass, and account for it, then sometimes you can make valid comparisons....within boundaries.
But at the end of the day, revealing is revealing. I had one prototype that i was pretty satisfied with in my downstairs and lab systems, and which several audio folks with good ears pronounced darned good at the price. ...Then i took it "upstairs".... and the truth came out :-) It was good but had its limits. I bit the bullet and made the changes i wanted to all along and now it truly sings. Maybe some day it will even see the light of the market.
G