Priorities must be set. For me the time I spent, not so much the money, was the downside in developing a high end audio experience. Assembling synergistic components in a sound friendly environment is a major commitment which takes many of us many years to accomplish. What I find sad is the I time lost after this had been accomplished listening to my 'audio system' that I could have more profitability used simply learning about and enjoying the music it could produce. That excellent system's sound became a major distraction because of the inclination to think that I could improve its audio aspects. I kept listening to the 'audio', music was important but truly not so much. My solution, and it seems to have worked, was to purposely dumb down my system down a tad. Now there is no doubt that I could improve, or at least change, it but I'm confident that what I hear tells me all about the music that I need to know. And I hear it and can ignore the call of the wild!
Law of Accelerated Returns
I think back over the many decades of pursuing high end audio and I realize some of the most inspirational were listening to state of the art systems. Systems I could never dream of affording. I occasionally would get up early and drive the two hours to Phoenix in hopes of finding no one listening to the state of the art system in “the big room” at one of the four or five high end audio stores there in the early ‘90’s.
One such time I was able to spend over an hour with the most amazing system I have ever heard: Wilson WAAM BAMM (or something like that… all Rowland electronics, Transparent interconnects). The system cost about over $.5 million… now, over a million… although I am sure it is even better (I can’t imagine how)..
But listening to that system was so mind blowing… so much better than anything I could conceive of, it just completely changed my expectation of what a system could be. It was orders of magnitude better than anything I had heard.
Interestingly, as impressed as I was… I did not want “that” sound, as much as I appreciated it. It still expanded my horizon as to what is possible. That is really important, as it is really easy to make judgments on what you have heard and not realize the possibilities… like never having left the small town in Kansas (no offense).
I keep reading these posts about diminishing returns. That isn’t the way it works. I recently read an article by Robert Harley in The Absolute Sound called the Law of Accelerated Returns that captures the concept perfectly. March 2022 issue. The possibilities in high end audio is incredible. Everyone interested in it in any way deserves to hear what is possible. It is mind expanding.