What I learned on Audiogon This Year


Things I learned from the forums this year:

1) In n Out Burger is the best fast food in the world, and Father's Office is the best Burger in LA (thanks BongoFury).

2) Widespread Panic and Arcade Fire are great bands.

3) All Digital is the wave of the future through downloads and analog is dead.

4) Analog is back to audio dominance and will continue to grow, digital is a trend and will die off except for convenience sake.

5) Don't ever say anything derogitory regarding certain types of gear that are defended by thier ______-mafia gangs. Especially___________________________.

6) Expensive Power cords are a still the biggest snake oil in audio.

7) Speakers are the most important place to start building a system.

8) Analog sounds better than digital.

9) Blu Ray is dead in the water, downloads for all media, video and audio is now the standard and will only continue to grow.

10) This is not a hobby, but a terrible affliction/addiction, and I need to change out some more gear.
macdadtexas
I learned that it it's best to buy tickets to the symphony, and go. So I did and I will.
That won't help you, their instruments are out of tune and they cannot hear it.
1) Recorded music through a stereo sounds better than a live concert

2a) A $3k coax cable on a $300 MF V-DAC is a great match

2b) The $300 MF V-DAC sounds better than anything under $10k, especially CDPs

3) Moving speaker cables (not disconnecting or moving them away from other cables) makes a difference

4) There's no such thing as too many acoustic panels

5) Sound quality of an album is far more improtant than the music itself

Those were the most enlightning posts for me this year. No idea how I survived in this hobby before I learned all this. Can't wait to learn more this year!!!
That won't help you, their instruments are out of tune and they cannot hear it.
LOL. True, but I can. Still helps me know when any particular system change is closer or farther from reality. If the local reality is less than ideal, oh well. All tuning schemes are relative anyway...

Recorded music through a stereo sounds better than a live concert
Surely that depends on the recording, and the concert.
I learned to NEVER answer the question: "what's your bottom line?" If you reveal the bottom line, that's where many Audiogoners want to start the negotiations. Therefore, when asked for the bottom line, I will always, in the future, answer: "make me your best offer and we'll go from there."
Here is what I learned from Audiogon in 2010.

Even with a good way to search the thread archives repeat questions will still be asked and to my surprised answered with minimal venom.

When you list a classified with free shipping to CONUS that buyer will probably live in the farthest city from you across the country.

There are very knowledgeable members here who are very giving with their time to answer questions thoroughly. I've learned a lot from participating in this forum.

Even if you list something at a very fair price there is always a low-baller sending you a very low borderline insulting offer.

When you think your response will be sent for moderator approval it will post immediately to the thread and vice versa.

Thanks everyone
Seems like a good old thread to help revive.

I sold a few things on Agon for the first time this year so I finally learned how to do that.
I also learned about dbpoweramp here first and moved to that for ripping my CDs to flac instead of Windows MEdia Player to .wav
Last year I think I discovered MusicBrainz Picard as a tool for smart autotagging of music files and have gotten a lot of mileage out of the combo of Picard and dbpoweramp together since for both ripping and tagging.
I still need to learn how to correctly use dbpoweramp batch tagger to automatically batch update album art files to my flac music files. Not having album art embedded in teh FLAC file causes problems correctly displaying album art when one moves from one software streamer to another.

I've also learned that auto smart autotagging with PLEX Pass (recognizes music files based on music content not tags, similar to Shazam) works pretty well to get your PLEX music library files tagged automatically but this only works with PLEX and cannot be leveraged with other music servers.
The words look like English Mapman but I have NO idea what you wrote. One of us moUst be an 👽
Translation: I've found dbpoweramp, Picard, and PLEX to be valuable tools for building and maintaining a music library. I learned about dbpoweramp and Picard initially here, PLEX I found on my own actually.

Has more to do with maintaining a large usable music library and less to do with sound quality though dbpoweramp CD ripping does help assure that.