I will say from experience, if the speaker is selected as the weakness, hopefully, speaker / room / listener positioning has been optimized, and room acoustics dealt with as much as possible before making a change.
Which component to upgrade?
This question could probably be posed under any of the topic options but the amp/preamp section seems to get most traffic. Someone on a currently active thread said he decided to move from an ARC Ref3 to Ref5SE and then up to Ref6 because he felt there was something missing in the music. I'm sure we all feel that to some degree almost regardless of the caliber of the system we own as our ears/brain gets more critical of what it consumes and feel the urge to upgrade. But how do we know which component in the audio chain is the one that is holding back what we miss? Some go the speaker path while others get a better source, DAC, or cable, etc.
What criteria do you use for deciding what upgrade path to take?
What criteria do you use for deciding what upgrade path to take?
4 responses Add your response
Here is a thread I started a while back about the same topic: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/finding-the-weakest-link-when-upgrading Not many posts to it recently, so I added my latest. Anyway it is a similar topic. A few months ago I decided to upgrade my Magnepan 3.6 to the 20.7 Basically on a whim of "Now of never" since I had some cash on hand, and the speakers were a long time wish. Now with the speakers, My dealer also let me try a SACD player I can also use as a DAC. Tried it yeah this is the right stuff. If my dealer had not loaned me the SACD player.. I would be wondering if I should buy a Schiit Ygg DAC. All this I refinanced my car to avoid CC interest. Now I am pretty set for sound quality. My old DAC was a used $250 cost Adcom DA700 I had stuff with antistatic foam and ran off AC at 110Hz instead of 60Hz AC power.(using a PS Audio P600 with variable AC output) My new SACD player/DAC is a $7000 Marantz SA-10 (I am unlikely to take the chance on trying 110Hz AC with a new $7000 piece of equipment!) That Adcom was a really good DAC but time to move up. I had wanted to get new amplifiers, but my dealer said that was a mistake. So sometimes a dealer who knows you can help find the right thing. (though it might be hard to trust a dealer who you do not know. I have known my Dealer since the 1980’s) This all is more about hat actually did. Rather than how I decided.. It is hard to say how it should be done for others. |
