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Good Advice

As an old mid-fi'er seeking to upgrade both my old Onkyo receiver and Boston Acoustic speakers, it was great to find this advice in Epinions.

"Dancing on the Diminishing Returns Curve: Choosing Stereo Speakers
Dec 15 '05 (Updated Feb 18 '06)

The Bottom Line Don't go overboard and turn into a "tweak." Buy something inexpensive but good, dial it in, and enjoy the music.

It happened again the other day.

I was at someone's house and they were showing me their $20,000 stereo. Tube amplifiers. Elite CD player. $6,000 speakers. It sounded...great. And boring. Precise imaging. Tight bass. Unbelievable delicacy. And the whole was...less than the sum of the parts. I was unmoved by the music.

And so was the owner, I think.

He had the furrowed brow of someone with audiophilia nervosa, obsessed with achieving audio nirvana and spending his listening time noticing imperfections that could only be improved with a different amplifier, or different speakers, or maybe different interconnects or speaker wires.

He could never be satisfied with his system, and he could never slow down and enjoy the MUSIC.

At home, I have a modest but good system consisting of $1000 speakers, under $1000 worth of solid state amplification (and a $600 tube integrated amplifier which I sometimes use), a modest CD player, turntable, tuner and subwoofer. And the thing is DIALED! It sounds great to me.

Yeah, the imaging is a bit diffuse, inner detail is only good, and the mid-bass is a little round. But who cares? When I listen to music, I enjoy the music. And I'm not thinking about what component to get next, even when I'm sprawled on my bed reading Stereophile magazine.

What did I do right?

I gave up on finding sonic perfection and found components that work well together. And I made sure the cost of each component was on that part of the diminishing returns curve where things flatten out: where large increments in amount spent lead only to small increments in sound improvement.

The bottom line is this: You can have an excellent stereo system for a fraction of what the "tweaks" are paying, and you'll probably enjoy your music more than they do. The speakers are probably the most important component in a home audio system, so shop around and figure out what kind of sound YOU like.

Then have fun assembling an inexpensive system that's 80% or 90% as good as the best out there. After that, forget about the system and enjoy the MUSIC."

Truth is, whether you're spending a 1K or 100K the bottom line (or what should be the bottom line) is the MUSIC and your enjoyment of it. If you lose sight of that, then I would really wonder "what are you spending your money on and what are you trying to accomplish?".
cleaneduphippy
bartokfan
664 posts
 
I have hundreds of hours in research finding the best of the best recordings of classical music. Invested $$$'s in my collection over the past 6 yrs. Kept 500+ cds, sold off during the apst 4 yrs and lost to katrina last yr...oh about another 500 cds+...so why should I do that smae DD (due diligence) in researching what I believe is the ..."best bang for the buck"...no amount of hype will misguide me. Its all about the music I agree. But why not try to find the best possibly listening medium for your enjoyment.
No merry-go-rounds for this kid..

Paul
Baton Rouge
dlr
195 posts
 
A couple days ago I found an old Wards Airline console at a garage sale. I bought it for $3 figuring I could take the tube electronics out and have some fun this summer as I am a teacher. I powered it up and put an album on. It sounded so weird as the speakers were in the wrong place and there was a big imbalance in output between channels. But I loved it. Its A Beautiful Day sounded great. My 16 year old daughter wants to put it in her room and listen to my old 45's. My wife wants it in the trash. Tubes and turntable in a console-what a blast! I think this is part of it. This is fun. I didn't care about the sound. I might just use it for my garage system. It even has rca imputs. The same day I bought a Kyocera cd player for $5 and hooked it up. Not great sound but fun and its music. Just my 2 cents. Dan
hammergjh
156 posts
 
I agree that we, in this hobby, obsess about the imperfections and sound artifacts that annoy us rather than the sound and the enjoyment of the music as a whole. However, given that we are into this hobby to enjoy higher quality sound reporduction of the music we love, it gets frustrating when we try to enjoy listening to music when it's reproduced poorly.

Those little nuances in the music and the recording that either annoy us or send us into nirvana are what makes or breaks this hobby for us. My system sounds great on well recorded CD's. Lousy, compressed, pop CD's sound bad and take the enjoyment out of it. THAT'S what is frustrating. No being able to listen to the music we love because it sounds so damn bad.

musicslug
403 posts
 
it sounds like your friend might have not observed rule #1 of audiophilism: just because a different component/tweak/IC/whatever makes your system sound different, that is not necessarily better. more detail, for example, is a lovely thing, but not if it comes at the cost of other factors.
tobias
1,534 posts
 
I guess it depends on how you see a "tweak". To me, Epinions is describing what I thought of as an "audiophile", until quite recently. A tweak is obsessed with gear and sees the forest not the trees (extension, air, et cetera and not the music), is that right? Can I put in a good word for the tweak?

To me, a tweak is something like a set of points, an isolation device, a change in speaker placement, an AC outlet, a rug on the floor in front of my listening chair... something which makes an audible difference to me but is not costly. I tweak a lot. The most important tweaks I think you can make are the ones that improve your room acoustics.

Do that thoroughly, and for sure you can get wonderful mileage out of modest gear. It might even be 80 to 90 % as good as the best out there when the best is not in a treated room.
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