Impress Your Friends and Seduce Women!

The more you are an audiophile, the less understood you will be. The general public has been educated that the difference between a cheap stereo and an expensive stereo is how powerful (or loud) it is. If you are still on the power kick then I suspect you are not yet an audiophile (I don't mean you Cwlondon). Many people seem to be utterly perplexed when they find that the large sums I spend on gear are not in the pursuit of being able to play the music louder. It is a huge mindshift for them to listen for how accurately the system is creating the sounds of real instruments and voices, seemingly because they never imagined people would try and do that. The general public has been trained that the pinnacle of audio is to go to a rock concert and the objective is clearly power, not fidelity.

Onhwy61 - I don't think I disagree with anything you said. One thing I have learned is to NEVER buy any gear that is not neutral or is dynamically constrained - if you ever do, you quickly tire of it and can be sent on an expensive and futile quest to compensate for it. Stating my point more simply, if I tell a novice how much my amplifier costs the first assumption they make is that it must deliver squillions of watts. When they hear the system, they ask how far the volume is turned up, because they figure it must be able to go a lot louder than this if it cost so much. Bencampbell - Sometimes I feel it is maddeningly close but that there is something going on, that if i could just eliminate it... At other times, I grab a book, put on a CD and read until the CD has finished and think that it had been so sublime that if I played another CD it would ruin the moment - and I retire with the audio equivalent of the aftertaste of the finest Burgundy. I suspect the difference is often driven by my state of contentment with life at the time rather than the state of my stereo.

Presumably not with Dogface's woman.

We kiwis are carrion for cats and dogs, and I suspect garfish are gobbled up by pussies too, but when I put it like that perhaps you have a point Albertporter.