Has anyone made the jump to $uper High end and were disappointed?

Very good cd players can be had used for not too much. As for computer listening, my current super high-end gear consists of $200 Grado headphones. Thinking about adding $300 Oppo dac/headphone amp plus $100 Audioquest cable. Later maybe a jump to Grado RS1 or some HiFi Man phones and better dac/amp. But I have no intention to spend much on this stuff.

I’ve heard numerous times “your system is only as good as the weakest link”

in many of the high $ systems, the material ( music) one listens to is actually the weakest length. Over at Computer Audiophile, people debate the merits of $5000 usb cables. In reality, general industrial grade data cables were used to transfer the master recording data to the cd pressing equipment. The same cables used on all these hi rez music streaming systems using general industrial server hard drives.

Most recording studios are wired to keep out noise more so than audiophile quality. Thus, most studios are wired with Beldon/ Canare level wiring. Plus, using general data cables and hard drives ( although Glymph caters to the audio/ video industry, i would not consider them audiophile since same drives are used as in any orher system)

At he end of the day......better sound is better sound....just something I’ve thought about

@aberyclark 

Good point.

I have a MoFi CD edition of Billy Joel's Turnstiles (1976) and a BluSpec CD edition of the same exact album. The BluSpec one happens to sound great across the board, no issues at all. The MoFi by comparison happens to sounds terrible, rather muffled and veiled both in tone and dynamic shadings. Possibly ok sounding in its own right, but in comparison with the BluSpec on my system it is noticeably lacking in a couple ways. Despite the fact that the BluSpec makes no claim about this disc being sourced from the master recording and the MoFi version does.

So, does that mean that MoFi on this release just had unfortunate access to crappy mastering equipment? I'm inclined to think not (I could be wrong), and I know that a lot of their other releases in their catalog can sound quite good. But, why would a mastering not made from the master tape sound plainly better than from one that is? (And here I'm throwing out the possibility, in this case anyway, that the original master tape has deteriorated due to age, as a factor - both sound fine in that regard). Does this rilly mean that lots of bad mastering equipment is still out there in use (all those terrible sounding remasters that we come across all the time), or is it more of a case of bad mastering techniques rather than equipment?

I'd say that you're right and that maybe we don't need $5k USB cables, but that maybe the music industry should stop long enough to take a harder look at what kind of cables they are connecting their mastering equipment with. Something at that end seems to be off somewhere.

Just a thought.

Cheers, John

This digital industry doesn't care about audiophiles, generally speaking, so they will use $1 one hundred feet digital cables, no problem. And they are right, most digiheads will think it sounds good on their devices. I did hear an opinion that $1k Purist Audio USB cable is really something. I also heard that top of the line Audioquest is excellent. If that $5k cable is even better than why not $5k ? Better than the same amount for a couple of rare records with nothing to talk about music.