Source or speaker

From just a distortion perspective, speakers do several orders of magnitude more damage to the signal that decent electronics. Factor in room interaction and it's a no- brainer where the emphasis needs to be.

I quite agree - it is a no brainer really. I would certainly NOT recommend to spend as much money on Interconnects/Cables as on the speakers/room acoustic treatments.

Most speakers have $100 wholesale mass produced drivers - you are paying almost entirely for veneer and cabinet work in most cases. Drivers are what actually makes the sound in many $50K+ systems...yes really... several $100 transducers powered by $1000's of wires and 10's of thousands of dollars of source and amplification.

Imagine if just a little more money went into the quality of the speaker drivers and into room design/acoustics instead...a scary thought.

Clearly, we hear differently.

I hear major differences between one room and another, one concert hall and another....others don't.

I hear major differences between one speaker and another....others don't.

I hear only subtle differences between digital sources and amplifiers....others hear major differences.

I rarely hear any difference at all between one interconnect and another or one cable and another...others hear major differences.

The end result is that we invest differently in our systems.

For example, I doubt I could hear the difference of suspending my amplifier from the ceiling with bungee cords...perhaps I have tin ears (probably true).

I just thought I should post that I never determined whether hanging the amp with bungee chords made any difference.

Glad to hear you didn't find an audible improvement - perhaps my ears aren't so bad after all. I get the impression from many posts extolling rather odd/extreme tweaks that I must simply have tin ears.

Bob,

Good point. In a way it all often amounts to "insurance".

If your engineering minded then XLR balanced "insures" you a better sound because you know it has theoretically better noise rejection and immunity from RF/EM. In reality RCA is often so good that you cannot hear a practical difference except in extreme conditions - long runs or a rats nest of components in a huge rack. The same can be said for "thermal compression" or "jitter" - the more technical specters that conjure fear in the hearts of technically minded. In the case of thermal compression - you have to play LOUD before it even becomes an issue.

For those less engineering minded then almost any tweak can seem like "insurance"- a magic pebble or a cable elevator. Provided there are a few people who swear by the tweak then seeds of doubt grow into monsters of our "Hi-Fi Id". These insurance tweaks are the preferred route to anxiety over our precious systems. In essence, nothing ever kills the Id monsters (of our subconscious fears) - so we just keep on tweaking and buying and upgrading...

Engineers or non-engineering minded, ultimately I think we are all mostly driven by dark fear or insecurities that we are not quite getting the utmost from our systems...and clever marketing folks pray on these fears.

Ultimately, our deepest subconscious desires and fears conjure invisible Monsters of the ID as depicted in Forbidden Planet and many art forms (Shakespeare's Tempest). Essentially our deepest desires lead to fears which subconsciously drive us in directions to fight them (whether we know it or not).

"The Krell forgot one thing: monsters from the id." -- Warren Stevens (as Doc Ostrow), Forbidden Planet

How I got my sytem to sound right (to me of course) was mostly out of luck.

Great point. You can take the totally random luck approach or you can take Bill's advice. I fourth Audiofeil!

Shardorne did I step on your toes?

Not at all - just poking fun ;-)

I simply tried to follow your own logic at the start of the thread. Either you built your system around your source ("get the source right and everything follows") or as you stated further down it was "mostly luck"??

Bill's advice to newbies is to start with speakers that you really like and go from there. I agree with this philosophy that is all. Frankly, I'd hazard a guess that it was actually not "mostly luck" for you, as you have an excellent pair of speakers!

But I believe the source is the reason spectacular systems sound the way that they do.

If by source you include the quality of the actual recording then there is no doubt that a good recording is a also a huge factor. Variability in recording quality is close to being on par with speakers/room acoustics...