Have I Hit The Point Of Diminishing Returns?

Macrojack, from my perspective you are the one who seems not to be able to get it. The law of diminishing returns is simple; we get it.

What you don't seem to see is that you have set the point of diminishing returns painfully low, and others disagree, and you have no way to demonstrate that we are wrong. Your opinion on where the law of diminishing returns kicks in is not absolute; somehow you seem to think it is. It is nothing other than your opinion, "...beyond a given point in your refinement trajectory you will pass a point beyond which further improvements come at an ever increasing cost ... that the reward will not be commensurate with the outlay." I have been trying to tell you that you are declaring what cannot be proven.

Jmcgrogan2 gets it, as he points out the same thing, that you are appealing to an absolute which does not exist.

Jmcgrogan2, I find your logic strained. Now that you left the $125K rig you state that the incremental gains didn't exist because you built a rig that's 90% as good? I would suggest you were doing things wrong then, when it came to your high priced rig, because at that point - at any point - one should not settle for a 2%, 5% or even 10% gain/improvement, but more like a perceptual 25% or 50% improvement. It is not worth a lot of money, if I were to state what I consider diminishing returns from a perspective of performance, to gain only a perceived 2% or 5% improvement, so if you were spending big dollars and content with that, I suggest you were vastly overspending to improve your rig. As a consequence, I can see why you think diminishing returns sets in quickly. However, I think it had more to do with your methodology of system building than anything else.

Simply building a lower cost rig that beat the prior higher priced one assembled does not demonstrate that generally lower cost rigs come oh, so close to higher priced ones. If you now nullify your previous impressions/conclusions about the $125K rig you had, distrusting them, how are we supposed to put confidence in your declaration that the lower end rig is so much better? Maybe if you went back to a $125K rig you would change your mind again!

But, you are correct in concluding, "since the return (musical satisfaction) cannot be quantified, whether it is diminishing or not cannot be measured."

I understand the definition of Diminishing Returns. My main point is if you can't measure reward, diminishing returns is up to the person writing the checks to decide.

Macrojack, perhaps you should quit while behind and stop further embarrassing yourself. The world doesn't revolve around you and you don't get to dictate what's ABSOLUTE.

Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole is not going to work. There's NO best in audio!

@Douglas_schroeder, I was reffering to dozens and dozens of "upgrades", maybe even a hundred, over a period of 15 years. I didn't just go from a $25K rig to a $125K in two weeks and proclaim a 5% or 10% upgrade. I'm talking upgrading fuses, yes a 4% improvement, upgraded power conditioner, 5% improvement, upgrade power cord, 5% improvement, upgrade phono stage, 10% improvement, upgrade cartridge, 10% improvement....etc., etc., etc....

So if all of those perceived improvements were actually real, or calculated correctly, then how come undoing it all only set me back to 90%? I am not saying that the incremental gains did not exist, only that they were probably not nearly as big as I thought they were at the time. Perhaps what I was thinking was a 5% improvement, was in actuality only a 0.25% improvement.

Yes, this is all said in hindsight. Obviously, if I had known that quadrupling the outlay would only increase performance by 10%, perhaps I would not have travelled that road. I may have just spent that money on some more exotic vacations. ;^)

this is one of those essentially unsolvable metaphysical queries with no right or wrong answers. i sort of agree with knghifi--where and whether one has hit the point of diminishing returns is ultimately up to the person writing the check. the way i look at it, while you certainly can objectively measure aspects of audio performance (e.g. signal-to-noise ratios, distortion levels, etc.), it doesn't necessarily follow that you can measure "improvement" on such basis, since so much of audio appreciation is inherently subjective--i.e. a component with "better" measured performance may not necessarily sound better to you for a whole host of reasons.
i'd also submit that people tend to fix their point of diminishing returns on the bases of their budgets. for example, i maintained for a long time that while the sonic differences between, say a $300 cdp and a $2000 cdp were very significant, the difference between that $2000 cdp and a $5000 cdp were only incremental (and, in my opinion, perhaps not cost justified). undoubtedly, if i had had more disposable cash, i would feel otherwise, and would set the point higher.
back to the mill.....