Interconnects:Dazed and Confused

Bob's right. It's a challenge to help customers over the internet. You never know what level of sound quality they are really at. They may be at level 5 and you are at level 10. Or you both may be at level 10... Sending out demo units helps.

It would be great to have some hard metrics for comparison, like for instance the clock alarm sequence in Dark Side of the Moon. With my system, I can tell how large the room was that the clocks were in and which clock is mounted on which of the three walls of the room. Most people are shocked when I say this. I have not found a customer that has this type of resolution yet.

Dark Side is child's play......Go get "After the Dance" by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn on Shanachie label (99006) and note the dog barking in the other end of the house from the recording venue. This was recorded on tracks 4, 12 & 15......On track 4, Goodbye Porkpie Hat, there is a doorbell at 1:57 into the cut and the dog goes to the door and at 2:11-2:25 and there is commotion with the dog coming from likely fifty feet away at the front door through good English lath and plaster.....Most systems will not reproduce much of this and doubt the mastering folks even heard it or they would have done a retake.....Track 12 has two dog barks and track 15 has three and suggest Q-Tips before listening to these tracks....Oh, the CD has better dog barks and the analog has a better door bell if one could find the vinyl......Great test of low level resolution on any system.....If everything is working then sounds like the dog is next door outside the listening room on track 4..........Tracks 12 and 15 are very subtle BTW......

Thanks for the advice and suggestions. The message I am getting is big money doesn't necessarily mean better music.I will take some time to audition some reasonably priced IC's.

Home trial is extremely important as many have pointed out, and knowing what works well together is, too. It is too easy for people to buy stuff online without ever listening to it first, and to make purchasing decisions based upon reviews and price is foolhardy. After you've been around the block a few times and have spent a lot of time and money changing stuff either because it doesn't work as well as you thought it would or because there's a new-and-improved version (some small time vendors are especially guilty of this), you get tired of it and realize you would have been better off buying something you know works very well because you've tried it and that it will not be quickly outmoded by the next new toy or version that comes along. Buying something sight unseen and unheard with the promise of money back if you're not satisfied is, in my biased opinion, not the right thing to do for several reasons. You may not find the right thing the first time around, and most people are reluctant to return something. You're not getting the chance to audition it before plunking down your money. Advice and service are important. Why spend $50 several times over instead of spending $200 once on something you know is the correct solution? The commoditization of the industry is surely the path to its demise.

Essentialaudio, don't you think, that for those that are not in the know, you should mention that you're a dealer?