Law of Accelerated Returns

The "law of diminishing returns" is overplayed to death, usually promoted by guys who:

• have upgraded poorly
• have a significant system imbalance or underlying issue which precludes high performance
• put a system together by reviews and "deals" instead of by ears
• have a vendetta against expensive gear and people who pursue it
• have never experienced a what a truly amazing state-of-the-art system can do

I like "the law of accelerated returns"! It can certainly happen when some new component, approach, or an identified weak link helps you bust out of a performance plateau.

Sure, SOME of it can be due to an increased appreciation of subtleties, cultivated over time in this hobby. But also, we each have completely custom systems with complex electrical, acoustical, and mechanical interactions. This makes for LOTS of potential performance bottlenecks. If you upgrade poorly, you will not properly address these bottlenecks, and you may exclaim "diminishing marginal returns!". If you do this for a while and then finally address the most significant issue, you may have a revelatory experience and exclaim "ACCELERATED returns!". There’s truth to both sides. But like I said before, I feel the hand of "diminished returns" is overplayed online - so what are we supposed to do, give up and try to force enjoyment of diminished system performance? That's too lazy and passive for how I prefer to approach this hobby. 

The "diminishing marginal utility" law is Economics 101, where everything is grossly oversimplified so that it can work nicely with infantile mathematical models. The real world is much more nuanced and complex than that.

So we have a proposed performance curve which is very pretty and supports diminishing returns towards the higher end of gear, but what about the PERCEPTION curve? Asymptotes can work in either direction! Say that we have a threshold for "suspension of disbelief". If I was sitting at 99% of this threshold, and I upgrade for a 1% absolute improvement, now I’m suddenly enjoying music past the threshold where it "feels" real - i.e. the 1% difference is perceived as a VAST improvement. If breaching this threshold was the primary goal, then any amount short of it (no matter how small) represents failure, and not good value! Of course the threshold varies by record, day, and mood, etc. And this is all a vast over-simplification (as is our limitation for discussions here). Human perception makes everything messy lol.

I don’t agree with that at all. For $500K you could make a tent sound good. Now would it sound much better than a $250K system? I couldn’t tell you that it would sound $250K better but it should sound better. Would it sound better than a $5K system? Darn tooting it would. Money spent well does relate sound quality as it does with everything else.

I’m not saying it’s practical, something I would do or really couldn’t imagine how you would actually spend that kinda money on bedroom but saying it would sound bad is total BS

@danager  That’s definitely not the point I was trying to make or argue.

Me: I’m tired of us continually re-hashing this silly hypothetical scenario
You: I disagree with your hypothetical scenario’s conclusion, let’s hash it out more

😅

Just curious, but when people say they have a $25,000.00 system or a $50,000.00 system is that a total of MSRP of equipment they own or is it what they paid for their equipment? I bought much of my system used at around 1/2 MSRP.

I used to worry about this on "price point roll calls", but over time I find I’ve passed most lines any way you slice it, and the next line up is impossible for me to attain :)

The reality is it doesn’t matter that much. Measure the cost anyway you like, within reason. Some things are more "solid" values than others. Amps like McIntosh hold value well against MSRP over time - and their vintage tube amps have actually appreciated greatly in value. On the other hand you have greatly "fluffed" MSRP listings from the likes of some small cable makers (I remember "Black Mountain Cable" did that here, years ago) and some other direct sales internet companies - nobody is gonna be impressed by a $50K system comprised of that crap.

Anyways, onto another topic - I do take issue with the growing continent of folks who treat the room like it’s some magic box that is simultaneously capable of:

• Making expensive gear sound like crap if you don’t meticulously treat the room with lots of treatments. A lot of this seems to be aimed at pushing acoustic panel sales...
• Making cheap gear sound like true high end if you DO meticulously treat the room (I really don’t agree with this point).

I don’t fall in the "room is a magic box" camp. I think of the room like another major component of a system, but not as an all-powerful arbiter to the resultant sound quality. Look, if you throw $500K of high-end gear in a spare bedroom, it’s gonna sound bad. We all get that. It’s not an interesting use case to keep hashing out. And I’m not disagreeing that some investment into room treatment is a great value. But at this level of gear and discussion, the assumption should be that someone spending big $ is going to put it into a room of adequate dimensions to let it breathe, and spend time positioning things optimally. One you have that, the actual gear composition of a system will typically shine right through - whether good or bad!

I have a local friend with a room that’s currently untreated (but he’s planning to change that soon). We’ve swapped amps, preamps, cartridges back & forth over the past year. EVERY component has shown its own consistent sonic signature between these 2 very different rooms, CLEAR AS DAY. And both rooms are capable of sounding superb. But when you put disagreeable components together - bad sound is the result. The room is absolutely a factor, but it’s not magical.

Too bad @mahgister is the only one who knows how to make a $500 system sound better than most (all?) $100K systems with careful placement of a shag rug, pillows, and some tapestry 😭

This hobby would be so much easier if only this valuable knowledge had been taught in school! I have literally never needed to find the volume of a sphere via double integration, but I still remember that useless crap :(

mahgister - is this more of a sith power, or jedi?

While acoustics are important, a real instrument no matter what acoustic environment it is played in, is easily identifiable as a real instrument. Acoustics can’t create dynamics, timbre, leading edge, inner detail, bandwidth or fidelity.

A talented musician I know plays a very crappy acoustic guitar they painted on. It doesn’t matter where she plays it, it’s a tinny, brittle sounding instrument.

100% this, again.