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Moderately priced audio

So I have been a audiophile for 40 years and in that time I have seen and owned a huge amount of equipment. Lately I have been reading Sterephile magazine and attended the last 2 years of Axpona. My question is what about the people that love the craft and get tremendous joy out of their audio systems that are in the $2-5K price range. Are they to be ignored? I know this hobby holds a lot of enthusiasm by people that have great sounding systems of new and vintage gear that they are proud of and enjoy listening to. While I appreciate the sound and the technology of the systems that cost more than a house I think there is a slice of enthusiast that are silent. Back in the 70s I worked at a stereo store that your average person came in and spent $600-$1000 and got a good sounding system. And we sold a lot of them. Seems a lot less interest today. Could it be the price of what you see in magazines and shows? I am curious to see if you people are out there that love the music and get great joy out of listening to your moderately priced audio equipment. Feel free to share what you have. I know you are out there. 
schmitty1

Showing 3 responses by inna

inna
7,865 posts
 
Yeah, another point is that what one calls moderately priced, either new or used, is very subjective, at least to the point. $5k new excellent amp is moderately priced in my view, $5k excellent cartridge is not. It doesn't matter whether or not I can afford it right away or ever. I try to assess the intrinsic value of these things and will not pay $3k for mediocre amp but might pay $5k for an excellent one.
However, I think I reached the limit of what is possible to achieve with inexpensive components. If I really want to make a big step up it is going to cost even used. As an example, the least expensive speakers that I might want is Kharma for about $4k used, on ebay right now.
inna
7,865 posts
 
Quite a number of people have good hearing. I demonstrated to a few of them how changing one pair of interconnects or one power cord can significantly make the sound better or worse. They were surprised indeed. And none of those interconnects and power cords were junk, they were all good but a few were excellent. The less expensive power cord was $150 used and the best was $650 used, the interconnects were $500, $800, $1500 and $1700, all suggested retail prices new. Overall the best were the most expensive in this case, the $800 ones were the best value, the $500 ones were not acceptable. By the way, in my complicated set-up I use them all except the $500 ones, for those experiments I just simplified the signal chain and used only one source.

inna
7,865 posts
 
Well, I don't have a single component in the system that cost me over $1k, either new or used, including cables and power cords. I count turntable/tonearm/cartridge as three components. But there are a lot of them, the components, so the total cost is not particularly low bit it is not high either. Moderate cost. And I see no reason to waist funds on anything that would not perform as good as what I have. I did have to pay for two pairs of new interconnects each almost as much as for a used turntable because I couldn't find them used, and the Purist Dominus power cord on my amp was about $2k when new.
So, the total system cost is probably around $11k, but most component were bought used.
$5k new for a system with one source ? It won't sound bad but it will sound much worse than what I got. I don't need it, better listen to computer with $200 Grado headphones.
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