Getting the best, the measure of their quality, from individual components assembled into a listening system especially if they are high acheivers is akin to assembling a complex list of ingredients for a complex food item.
For a master chef the list of many ingredients coupled to a particular and nuanced way the many stages of the process must be undertaken is no bother. The master chef has been shown how to assemble which ingredients, the right and the wrong way to undertake the intricate stages of the process of acheiving the flavour result and how serving the final result affects the same.
A novice or amateur working under their own steam with no formal training and gleaning information from whoever offers it, might produce a masterpiece of this complex dish with complex stages and nuanced particular requirements. Generally however a complex dish with complex stages which all need to be performed correctly for a top notch end result will fall short. The combined lack of full insight and understanding of what is neccessary undermines result even if all of the assembled raw ingredients for the recipe are beyond criticism.
Hifi is a lot like that.
When we talk about systems and we see, with our eyes, the list of ingredients in the system, The list of components in that system. We are not seeing how accomplished is the person who put the system together. That can only be heard. From my own experience, first hand, of listening to a lot of systems other people put together. Even with first rate ingredients. Using records I brought along to every audition as a control. Most were murky and ill defined, even if ’pleasant and inoffensive’. Inoffensive sound. Murky and ill defined. With completely satisfied, even boastful, owners.
The biggest barrier to extracting the utmost from a collection of ingredients which work together in complex ways is the individual doing the assembly and the limitations of their understanding and lack of practical experience in optimising what they have assembled by way of ingredients.
The lesson: Read. Ask. Take time. Get out of your home and listen to as many different systems as you can acess. Find out why things sound excellent and what hinders. There is a lot which still remains barely known to any, myself included, but there is a lot of shared wisdom. Biggest thing is to get out of home with your CDs, records whatever and find out how good they should sound. That is tasting the recipe done right. Then after that we know if our efforts with the ingredients we have assembled approach or fall short by however much. Some combinations of components(systems) have no chance of ever producing the utmost of each individual ingredient. Many many many good ingredients combined(systems) simply are not being assembled and untilised optimally. That which we call tweaking for optimum the master chef calls doing the process right. Unlike cooking we can reverse and undo our mistakes, but we have to know first where we went wrong and have been exposed to an understanding of the correct process and what a great example of the taste of our recordings sounds like.
Better to be a great chef with modest ingredients than a naff chef with the best available ingredients.
