Why do so many members seem afraid of making an audio decision?

@russbutton 

I am definitely not into throwing money at getting great sound… but great sound is what I am after… end of story. I have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours evaluating interconnects and cables. More evaluating components. I have also built some of my own speakers and speaker cables. But I found that carefully chosen components of all types, having professionals competing in the market place can exceed my meager attempts to reproduce their work.

I am not saying this can’t be fun.. an a great way to assemble a great sounding cost effective budget system. But for those wanting the best high end system they can afford are best served by learning by those that have gone before them. I have fifty years of pursuing the high end… always cost constrained, but with an increasing budget, and there are some known routes to get there. 

@phusis 

@russbutton 

It depends on your objective. Is this a process for learning and experimentation where the process is your goal or do you want a high-end sound system soon… and spend most of your life listening to great systems and music.

The complexities involved with coming up a great system at a given investment level are huge and very time consuming to unravel. If you like bouncing around in solution space (like a ball in a pinball machine) rediscovering things already known and relishing it… go for it. But there are very well understood principles and guidelines to assess your own values, evaluate and match equipment to achieve the highest sound quality for the money. Most folks are not interested in making a challenging pursuit more difficult, but if it makes you happy, go for it. 
 

Most folks learn about the principles of algebra, Newtonian physics and quantum physics instead of ignoring them and deriving them from first principles. But one can do it either way. 
 

@danager

I understand where you are coming from. But remember that is low fi to mid-fi.

Companies like Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, Cardas… virtually all high end companies were not started as primarily money making enterprises… quite on the contrary, they were started by engineers absolutely passionate about sound reproduction. They hoped to make a living some day. Most nearly did not survive. I recommend reading about the history of ARC. The founder and his wife working from their house nearly lost everything when a vendor provided capacitors that exploded… he informed every single owner and fixed them (paying for shipping… everything) out of his own pocket. Mealy bankruping them… it was more important that his reputation remained untarnished and his customers trusted him than making money.

I worked with very closely the founder of a high tech company, Tom Brown… from Burr-Brown corporation for nearly 20 years. Literally working from his garage in the ‘50s created one of the most respected companies manufacturing Digital to Analog converters for the high end audio industry. A more humble and genial human you will never meet. The company always struggled with profitability… because he cared first about the products and his customers and employees.

Your stories are certainly true, but generally confined of low to mid-level stuff. I am sure a bunch of folks have tried to enter the cable market because low material cost to price. But, most get weeded out because in the long run companies like Transparent, Cardas, Audio Quest put so much money into Research and development they provide real value and more sophisticated sound.

Many of us have learned over decades.

Learning to listen is many many layered, the information at every level is contradictory, the investments are substantial, overall sound quality depends on the whole system, many step are counter intuitive, the benefits are frequently not fully realized until hundreds of hours of use, and many folks are not good with complex decision making to start with, at least until they have heard concrete improvements in sound quality as a result of their choices.

It goes on. Decision making in highly uncertain environments takes skill (function of prefrontal cortex) and years of experience really help.