Is it important to long demo or own HIGH END gear to have a fair accurate view about it?

@dayglow I’ll buy that!

I would only add that DSP and room correction is a relatively new tool in the audiophile arsenal to help effectively deal with room acoustics and that is something the modern audiophile needs to be aware of these days as well BEFORE trying to fix a bad room by throwing more money at the gear and/or going nuts with room treatments alone . DSP and treatments like bass traps in particular together can be applied cost effectively and if done right might save folks quite a bit of hard-earned cash down the road.

Cheers!

@dayglow Well count me out as a serious audiophile then (which is quite OK) because I would not drop a fortune on gear before first understanding the acoustics of the room it was going to be asked to perform in. That's a recipe for vendor success and buyer disaster.

The only piece of gear I have owned in teh last 20 years that was a absolute clear bottleneck on good sound was a Carver pre-amp. I had Carver amp and tuner (still do) and the tuner was/is quite good and teh amp actually not bad if used properly.

A fellow audiogoner whose advice I trusted told me flat out dump teh pre-amp. So I did and replaced it with a Audio Research model.

I have had many changes since then each of which introduced a change in sound, mostly for the better. I have been in a very good place in relation to live music I hear and teh best "reference" systems I hear around for a number of years. That’s not to say there is probably almost always something one can do to get even better. It may or may not cost more. It all depends on educated decision making. Nothing great ever comes easy. How much it costs is another story and can vary widely. My $130 Fosi amp does a top notch job in its role on my little nearfield desktop system. Some day I may try to ask more of it and see how it sounds when given a much tougher job.

To me, the main thing one needs to be in a good position to make useful judgements is experience listening.  Both to live music and to as many reference systems as possible.  That is the only way to really know what is possible and set a realistic goal.  Then its pretty much anything goes from there and more power to the winners.

The fact of the matter is most people’s rooms are not so big that it takes a massive million dollar hifi to do the job well.

The other fact of the matter is no matter what you put in there, the room in most cases will be a big factor in determining the resulting sound. So throwing money at equipment without first getting a handle on room acoustics is not a practical approach to achieve the best possible sound.

Although, it’s also true that

1) Hi end gear are luxury items so one also would naturally expect a certain amount of visual bling as well as excellent performance, so there is that, and

2) part of what goes into judging good sound is often subjective, so anything is possible there.

The more decisions are made based on subjective criteria, more possible outcomes will result. This is evidenced by the fact that few systems end up being exactly the same and often not even similar sounding, even at "high end" shows. The only thing all the gear demoed at a high end show have in common is higher than average cost.

Lower the prices then more people can actually  buy and own and have a more accurate view. 💡