High End Myth Glossary.


Disclaimer:
Many of the glossary terms bellow are entered with little or no comments. Large comments might require large space and time investment. If anyone reading this glossary is offended, than I'll keep you a company as well. Every myth-paragraph bellow adds a price to the audiocomponent only without substantial improvements and "upgrades" to your system.

Feel free to add to the list bellow:

1. Cables' price should be arround 10...20% of the whole system i.e if the system costs $100k than $10...20k should be for interconnects and speaker cables.

2. Directional signal cables.

3. Zero Negative Feedback.

4. $10k 10Wpc amps.

5. No need for larger output power. Place compact system speaker into the plywood horn enclosure and use SET 1W/ch.

6. Tube watts v.s. SS watts.

7. CD-players or digital separates over $1.5k(Analogue sources stay somewhere next to but not to the same degree for example $10k cartridges)

8. Audiable differences in .3dB or in .5%THD v.s. .001%THD.

9. Auditioning of audio furniture.

10. Stereophile or other oriented magazines one-person "expert reviews"

11. $5000 Mark Levinson amp looks like it should sound excellent...

12. $12k CD-player reads CD with greater precision.

13. tubes $900/matched pr

14. amp stands $600/pr.

15. microphonic-free chasis, power interconnects and speaker wires. tubes and transistors can certainly be added as well.

16. wire reactance influence on audio freequencies.

17. Nirvana speaker wire has substantially less reactance than Home Depot.

18. S/N ratings of CD-player(larger than CD's dynamic range 16bit = only 60dB!)

P.S. I would be also glad to see Worst-of section in forums here.
marakanetz

Showing 2 responses by viridian

Please, let me add two of my favorites:

1) Belt drive turntables are superior to direct drive turntables.

Younger audiophiles can be excused as they have probably only heard mid line junk from Japanese mass market makers. Older audiophiles may have fallen under the spell of the Linn mistique (I too owned one for many moons). But anyone who has taken time to listen to a properly set-up Denon DP-6000, Technics SP-10 MK2, Goldmund, or similar high end direct drives will quickly realize that these tables are fully competitive, though with a different set of virtues, with the likes of Linn, VPI, SOTA, Rega, etc. I might add that the cost to produce these monsters, in 2003 dollars would be as staggering as the prices on current top line turntables.

2) Older gear is eclipsed by modern gear at comparable price points.

I discuss thirty year old turntables above. The two best tuners to ever issue forth from the hand of man are the Fisher FM-1000 and Marantz 10B. Thiry years later they still have not been surpassed. Even upper line analog tuners from Sansui, Kenwood, Yamaha and Pioneer are incredibly good and sell at very moderate prices. Many fourty year old tube amps, with a little upgrading, are also quite competitive. The Heath WM-4 and WM-5 come to mind and the 807 triode amps from Stancor are unbelieveable, even by current standards. Advertisers have brain washed us into thinking that everything old is just junk, but it just ain't so.