Can $15,000 Sound As Good As $75,000?

as someone who's climbed the ladder for a long while, i have no plans to search for a system with an msrp equal to 1/4 of my present one. sure, i've heard great systems that retail for $15k and lousy ones for $100k. i am presently upgrading from a pre/dac that retails for roughly $18.5k (w/ options) to one that goes for $15k, cuz the latter is a better "value" in the context of my system as a whole. but this is the first time i can recall going backwards on the price scale. this is just my own experience, tho, and not an endorsement of any system-building strategy. -kelly

$15K sounds better to me. There is still $60K in the bank!

Great Question and what I suspect that to justify spending 75K on a system which would also have exceptional bass that couldn't be had in the 15K system, a large room is required. That to me is the justification in spending more as Reprince notes, he likes Organ music and the like and to approach real life dynamics, especially in the nether region, more must be spent.

From a musical involvement point of view, I doubt that one needs to spend the big money unless they are looking for the above, big sound in a big room in an attempt to replicate live music dynamics. A daunting challenge to get right.

Although I personally haven't nor ever would spent that amount, (current system about 27K retail) I have heard enough large megabuck systems over the years to feel qualified to offer my opinion. The best of them was an audiophile acquaintence who had multiple mono amps driving a large Infinity Beta System in a HUGE room with a 25' ceiling. Total value including analog and digital exceeded well over 100K retail. He passed away in 1994.

So far as music reproduction it was excellent but bigger than it needed to be for musical enjoyment IMHO. What it did do is impress, especially on HT where to this day remains the most awesome HT set-up I ever heard, it could almost shake you out of you shoes.

Very interesting post. I agree that cost is not the absolute factor in determining how good a system is. It would be easy to pick high priced components that lack synergy and get your audio doors blown off by a less costly system. However, all things being equal in terms of knowledge and synergy, I have found a correlation between cost and the capabilities of my system. I believe that at some point, there are diminishing returns, but returns nonetheless. Sometimes these improvements have made an immediate but no so lasting impression -- meaning the "golly gee", "oh wow", "hot damn" effect doesn't jump out at me down the road in the same way it did on day one.

I have not come close to that point of diminishing returns yet (less than $30,000 new street cost in my system -- most bought used). Like Kelly, I don't envision myself moving down the ladder in terms of cost. However, I think at some point I might be inclined to *simplify*. My system takes up quite a bit of space, has lots of IC's and PC's and more glowing tubes and leds than I'd care to count. Maybe it's a product of age (mine not the system's -- it seems to be aging more gracefully than I am), but those garden hose cables and large speakers have a little less visual appeal to me on some days than they did in years past. This disappears as soon as I fire things up, though.

This is somewhat off-topic, but I often wonder what sound I could achieve if I down-scaled a little -- not in terms of cost, but in size and number of components. Food for thought.

Again, a thought provoking post Onhwy61. Like I'm not already thinking about this hobby too much as it is.

Sorry for the redundancy in the first 2 para. of the post. Did I mention real dynamics, more money and justification enough to get across the point do you think?