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Five "Golden Rules" of HiFi?

Tough question, but if you had to list your 5 most important "Golden Rules" of hifi, from your own experiences, what would they be?
To start things off, mine would be:

1. Protect your hearing; without it, the rest is pointless.
2. Use a surge/overvoltage protection power board
3. Read lots of reviews and forums like this one
4. Don't buy secondhand speakers (bad experience!)
5. Never buy gear without listening to your own music through it.
carl109
mapman's avatar
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mapman
15,679 posts
 
Read, listen and learn.
jetter
1,035 posts
 
Where ever jaybo went, I miss his positive posts and wisdom.  For example, his post above, "only 2 rules.......1. one's love of music has nothing to do with equipment or media. 2. one's love of equipment or media has nothing to do with music" is just so right on.
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gillatgh
224 posts
 

Superb wisdom by all participants in this thread. It just so happens I agree with them all. A couple of things I found while on my journey toward  musical nirvana were:

1) If you can buy used from a reputable site such as audiogon, not ebay. I have purchased most of my system used and its always been an improvement and its always been exemplary equipment. Latest purchase were speakers and I could not be happier.

2) Your room is more important than your best piece of equipment

3) Listen with YOUR ears not someone elses. Everybody has different tastes so you are the one living with yours. Trust yourself 1st.

4) The most expensive cable is not necessarily the best for you. I've "downgraded" my cables from very expensive to very reasonable and obtained IMO better sound.

5) Live and Love music, the more genres of music you love the closer you'll be to nirvana.

To end this I'm within hearing distance of Audio Nirvana now (only a few minor tweaks required, I think) but it took 50 years to get here one detail at a time.

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