The Emperor Has No Clothes!!

Most people thinking that their speakers sound at their top optimal S.Q. when they put them in a non dedicated room are delusional by cirscontances or price or ignorance...

Not all people had the luxury of an acoustic dedicated room...

Not all people had the money to ask an acoustician to build one...

Not all people have the time and the knowledge necessary to build one at low cost...

I am sorry about these truth facts...😁

No gear sellers will ever say trying to sell you his miraculous product or after selling it to you , that his costly piece of gear especially the speakers need a dedicated room to sound at their top ...

I learned that because i had no other choice than to investigate....Nobody said that to me....😁

The knowledgeable will claim at most that room acoustics matter... i read that years ago and decided to experiment ...

But in fact acoustics concepts and experiments is the key of audiophile experience, for any system at any price ...The price tags does not matter here ...

( And yes to put the point on the letter (i) a better designed system had a better potential this is a common place fact which not does contradict in any way my point above but confirm it )

But there is a good news hidden in this acoustics inconvenient truth. upgrading the gear is not always the best solution. And modest acoustic change in a living room can pay more than a very costlier possible upgrade...

Thanks interesting anecdote confirming my experience...

Here’s a story for you all regarding the room.  I have my listening room which is quite large but has dormers.  I had some corner traps and a few absorption panels on the front wall behind the speakers.  Now my shop is 30x30 with a drywall ceiling finished in textured spackling.  The walls are insulated and covered with perforated Masonite.  That makes the shop hemianechoic (mostly).  When I sold my Thiel speakers a couple of years back I set them up in the shop with a cheap little bluetooth amp so the buyer could audition them before purchase.  The Thiels sounded amazing in the shop.  I got sick to my stomach because they sounded so good.  This was nuts.   My first thought was cancel the sale but the buyer was already on the way.  I was ready to move my stereo to the shop until my wife talked me off the ledge.  So I went to work on my room.  It took me a couple of months, but I got the room to sound much, much better.  Mainly I had to work on the sloped ceilings but also put absorbers- bass traps in the dormers.  The last issue is signal to noise.  The diffusers and absorbers actually helped with that too.  Still, if I had room in the shop…

Lets face it, if there was a majority of people acoustically informed the industry will collapse to essentials...

Each time in my life i was conned it was mostly my fault ; i did not wish to inform myself by laziness or by blind reactive emotion...

Then dont exclude yourself scapegoating others...

Let's face it. If there were no people who could be conned, the industry would collapse.

Wise Post from the OP 😊!

This is what my first dreamed stereo system was looking like ( in fact all the pieces of my first system wasin one furniture box) 😁 when i thought that this was the dreamed Hi-Fi upgrade with no knowledge about mechanical and electrical embeddings controls devices at the times and no acoustics knowledge at all ...

Things are not so much different today when people are focussed on gear piece price tags more than on the relation between gear pieces(synergy) and the room acoustic content and your head-ears-brain characteristics..

Then it is not suprizing that the vocabulary used in audio threads revolved around gear pieces descriptions as if the gear own all sound perceived qualities , described as S.S. or Tubes or vinyl like or digital like etc ...😊

 As i said  above there is FIVE vocabularies different dictionaries  in audio, pick the right one and dont conflate them all ...

In audio many people had no acoustics concepts or training, they think that all pertain and is explained by design of gear pieces be it tube or S.S. or class D or Class A etc or Vinyl versus Dac etc ...

But an audio stereo system work as a whole synergetically or not in three working dimensions : mechanical, electrical and acoustical...

Then even if design choices of each gear pieces matter for sure , it matter less at the end than the way we use each one of them in and for a system/room/ ears-brain ...

Because reviewers and marketing sell a piece of gear as a solution, people forget not only synergy necessities but they dont focus on the system as a whole and they dont focus on the ways( mechanical, electrical and acoustical) the system must be inserted in these working dimensions in a rightfull manner.

Then they use gross classification based on price tags : low fi, mid-fi, high fi. And they think that solutions are all costly and ready made.

There is five vocabulary in audio : electronical design concepts and vocabulary, audiophile threads language, musical concepts, acoustical vocabulary, psychoacoustical concepts ... We must learn how to hear and learn how to distinguish all these concepts in a concrete way.

«This emperor  has too much clothes»-- Groucho Marx🤓