The law of diminshing returns?

Like most hobbies value is not the primary goal, it’s personal enjoyment we’re after within our budgets.

Enjoyment and also objective learning  about basics (acoustics being the most important ) ...

Now i learned basics and i enjoy music with a good sound  with no  squirrel upgrading wheel  obsession...Because it is a low cost system , it does not mean that it has no value for audiophile... Any system at any price can reach his optimal working level or not...

Thats audiophile goal: any system must reach his optimal working level  using audio basics knowledge... Price has nothing to do with audiophile learnings...

 It is more important to have a dedicated acoustically controlled room anyway than a 100,000 bucks system in the living room ...

We live an era where price does not means as much as in the past decades... Thanks to engineerring progress in audio...

Buy an Edgar Choueiri DSP system for example if your budget is higher than mine and call it job done...

Read Choueiri articles and see his video to understand why...

This is not marketing it is a plasma physicist with a job who do acoustics studies as a hobby...

@ghdprentice    +1  Acceptance of the facts that time/effort/knowledge and money will give one better results when assembling a HEA system. Many budget orientated Audiophiles lack knowledge due to the limited time and effort applied to this hobby, claiming "snake oil"(law of diminishing returns) as their mantra.

As written , @ghdprentice post doesn’t deny that there is an asymptote, but rather that some individuals are willing to spend limitless amounts of money to get every last drop of sonic benefit.

  Those people are entitled to do that and I am not being critical.  However many of us believe that the biggest improvement occurs when one gets out of budget gear and ascends into the low high end.  Past that improvement is audible but the value equation becomes less favorable.  Whether or not this matters to a given individual is a personal choice 

This kind of article is there just to increase traffic and discussion in the forums.

The same guy wrote a 12k$ DAC review recently with the opposite conclusion. Don't buy a 200$dac if you have a high end system...

https://hometheaterhifi.com/reviews/dac/emm-labs-ma3i-digital-to-analog-converter-review/

His conclusions:

The EMM Labs MA3i D/A Converter is a superb electrical engineering accomplishment. Its standout feature is vanishingly low harmonic distortion. Remember, though, what gets to the speakers is limited by the highest distortion component in the signal chain, including the speakers, for that matter. If you obtain a DAC of this quality, you need to be sure your other components are worthy. And, if your other components are really high-end, don’t buy a $200 DAC.