@danager
Some good points. I wonder what the total cost was… a lot more over my lifetime.
The wonderful hours of music, and the hours of research have been truly enjoyable to me. My first career was as a scientist, so I love really complex ambiguous problems. I love solving multifaceted ambiguous problems… like, I have my system that sounds like this, and I want to get the maximum sound quality improvement (of a certain kind) spending the least amount of money: all the vendors exaggerate, most of measured parameters mean nothing as far as sound quality, reviews are slanted towards a different set of values than mine… my budget is limited… etc.
Over the last twenty years I feel I really got my arms around the pursuit and my values in sound quality. Component choices have become very easy to make and have performed in themselves and in my system exactly as I thought they would. In fact, I have been able to order a number of items without actually hearing them, and have them perform in my system exactly as I anticipated (for instance th Sonus Faber Olympica III I purchased unheard 10 years ago). This is nearly as rewarding as listening to my system… which, even after making no major changes for a couple years, surprises and delights me on a daily basis.
The above made me want to help others where possible achieve what they desire in audio. Especially when starting off, when one bad judgement, misstep, or attributing a change to the wrong thing can send one down a dead end or just sour one’s belief in high end audio. You hear them chime in on many of the threads on the forum. Those that don’t believe in interconnects, or better sounding components, or science doesn’t prove it, so it is just BS, or it’s all just marketing or psychology… the path is littered with the disenfranchised.
It is a very complex and ambiguous path to get to audio nirvana… but for those of us that have been successful, it has been a tremendous accomplishment and joyful pursuit.
