Latest Absolute Sound

The balk majority of products that pass thru TAS and Stereophile  I will never own, but I do enjoy reading about such products and get a kick out of the way the reviewer go to great lengths to describe the sound. As already said take it with a large grain of salt, and enjoy the glossy pictures.

No books, no music. Just refrigerator, TV and guns.

Does anybody sit in front of their relatively inexpensive but carefully assembled rig in an "active listening" session and think, "Damn, this sounds SO FRIGGIN' GREAT?" I agree with a comment in a recent mag that said something like "nobody really knows what an original recording sounds like as even the engineers heard it through monitors that can't ever be actually neutral." When I (rarely) sit in some high end audio "salon" listening to Magicos hooked directly to an offshore tax shelter, I often think…hmmm…my stuff sounds better…and, interestingly, it actually does.

Wolf, in the audioverse people spend large sums of money for very small differences in sound quality.  From my perspective $5k buys a good system and $20k gets you into serious sound quality.  People spending multiples of that amount can readily get better sonic performance, but it's a very small increase.  From what I can tell these people are perfectly happy spending the money for those results.  Magazines (and audiophiles mimicking the mags) resort to hyperbolic language to describe the small changes.  So yes, relatively inexpensive systems can sound "SO FRIGGIN' GREAT", but it is also possible to sound slightly more FRIGGIN' GREAT if you want to spend the money.

It's also possible to spend large sums of money and get a poor performing system, but let's assume most audiophiles have a decent sense for good quality sound and know what they are doing.

Here's my system:
Vandersteen 5A loudspeakers
Luxman 509U integrated, 120 wpc
Luxman D06 CD/SACD player
TT, but rarely ever used these days/weeks/months/years.

I often sit in front and think "Damn, this sounds so friggin' great".

But, of course, my set-up has tone controls that I use to adjust many older recordings, so they sound friggin' great to me.  Without them, the good discs sound fg, but the poor ones do not.