Does upgrading you system have to be on a logarithmic curve?

@overthemoon

I have read about the rooms full of people doing arithmetic for astronomers fifty or a hundred years before I went to college. In the ‘50’s every scientist and engineer carried a slide rule… or a book of tables. That is the way Sputnik got launched… most of the early space race was based on slide-rules! It is incredible isn’t it? I had three! I lusted after the K&E Bamboo for years… way out of my financial ability. The smoothness and effortlessness of using it.

Then virtually overnight… it was gone… buggy whips lasted a lot longer… there was such a long transition. Overnight, calculators replaced slide rules.

Our technology today is built on the shoulders of such incredible advancement. My father worked a team of horses to plow the fields! … and rode a horse drawn cart to go to town for supplies! I went down with my father to shovel coal into the furnace for heat each night (Chicago) so we had heat every night! Wow.

I implemented global system to run entire corporations from a single computer system while flying around the world in less than a month… many times. Incredible change.

@jjss49

K&E bamboo slide rule.

I started school before the pocket calculator… for me, the first I could afford was the Texas Instruments SR-50 calculator (I could not afford HP35 calculator). My physics labs took 12 hours of work… 11 of the hours futzing with the slide rule. When I got my SR-50… the time to complete a lab went down to one hour! Speaking of a time saver.

It was with great pleasure decades later I ended up working for Texas Instruments.

@danager

Some good points. I wonder what the total cost was… a lot more over my lifetime.

The wonderful hours of music, and the hours of research have been truly enjoyable to me. My first career was as a scientist, so I love really complex ambiguous problems. I love solving multifaceted ambiguous problems… like, I have my system that sounds like this, and I want to get the maximum sound quality improvement (of a certain kind) spending the least amount of money: all the vendors exaggerate, most of measured parameters mean nothing as far as sound quality, reviews are slanted towards a different set of values than mine… my budget is limited… etc.

Over the last twenty years I feel I really got my arms around the pursuit and my values in sound quality. Component choices have become very easy to make and have performed in themselves and in my system exactly as I thought they would. In fact, I have been able to order a number of items without actually hearing them, and have them perform in my system exactly as I anticipated (for instance th Sonus Faber Olympica III I purchased unheard 10 years ago). This is nearly as rewarding as listening to my system… which, even after making no major changes for a couple years, surprises and delights me on a daily basis.

The above made me want to help others where possible achieve what they desire in audio. Especially when starting off, when one bad judgement, misstep, or attributing a change to the wrong thing can send one down a dead end or just sour one’s belief in high end audio. You hear them chime in on many of the threads on the forum. Those that don’t believe in interconnects, or better sounding components, or science doesn’t prove it, so it is just BS, or it’s all just marketing or psychology… the path is littered with the disenfranchised.

It is a very complex and ambiguous path to get to audio nirvana… but for those of us that have been successful, it has been a tremendous accomplishment and joyful pursuit.

@jjss49 

I have my K&E bamboo in my desk drawer… would you like to borrow it? I haven’t been using it much since 1974.

I have grown my system from a $350 affair in 1972 to it’s current state of around $150K. I have methodically and incrementally invested over the entire time. I have spent thousands of hours learning, experimenting with cables, cords, and components. I have spent thousands of hours traveling all over the world with every portable musical device / combination you can imagine.

Large investments components has brought me larger and greater jumps in sound quality along the way. The very largest differences were the most recent and the largest investment.

If, let’s say you measure the frequency response or something… sure diminishing returns.

But it is about the music…. and the ears / brain can be an astonishingly sensitive instrument. “Great sound quality”… is about peeling back layer after layer of what that means… an enormous onion… layer after layer of nuance to bring pleasure to the listener.

Of course, it is a matter of values. I really value high quality sound… that is musical, nuanced, incredibly accurate… like brass sounds like brass… not trebly distortion like most of us though cymbals sounded like when we were young. So, for me the gains have increased with investment.

Audiophilia is all about the real love of musical reproduction. Most people think we are crazy… why walk down this diminishing return return curve. But those of us that fell in love with really great musical reproduction as youth see the reward as accelerating return. That has absolutely been my experience. I am absolutely ecstatic with my current systems (see my UserID).