The MBLS put out sound allover which is a waste of power from the amp. What you are listening to is echo coming off the walls and glass windows. Also the speakers are too big. You are never gonnna get speakers as big as that to disappear from the soundstage!
Really expensive systems that sounded great?
I often laugh at megabucks systems ($100K and above) I hear because so often they are just OK, or the presentation is so off in one dimension or another I can barely listen to them for long.
What I’d like to ask now is what megabucks systems have you heard which you felt actually were worth the asking price? I don’t mean incrementally better than your $20k system. I mean leaps and bounds. Anyone?
The best system close to that I ever heard was the top of the line Vandersteen speakers and Vandersteen monoblock amps driven by VTL preamp (I believe) at a show in Oakland. Nothing else I heard in that price range or above sounded worth it to my poor ears.
Lets try to stay wealth-positive here and stick to things we actually LIKED. 😁
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Some of the best sounding systems I’ve heard were pretty high dollar, some only on the "expensive" side (😁), but were assembled by extremely talented people. Understanding system synergy, acoustics, electrical interactions, and the influence of the whole chain is extremely important. You’re simply not going to drive speakers like MBLs or Magicos with your average "good" amplifier, even if it cost a lot....speakers like that tend to sort out the contenders from the pretenders and it can be a painful learning curve, or an exercise in blissful ignorance if it sounds bad and the owners love it anyway. Good sound doesn't know whether it cost a lot or a little, and there's often not even much of a correlation. I don’t own high dollar stuff, but the exposure to the really good systems has helped me get a taste of good sound...lack of budget just forced me to find another way. |
Seeing @ghdprentice called a fool - Now I remember why I stopped posting here for many months. But since trolls need feeding, else they wither and die, I will state that not all drivers are off the shelf and cost a few hundred dollars. While the vapor deposited beryllium coincident drivers in My TAD’s are expensive, they supposedly cost millions in R&D to develop over many years, which has to be factored into the price. When Andrew Jones created much less expensive coincident drivers for the Elac Adante,which I use for LCR home theater, they were also bespoke, not off the shelf. I put together a well performing $8K simple system based on a Hegel H190 when I was away from home for a year. When I finally returned home and fired up my system that cost around 15 times as much, it was evident that one system made pleasant, enjoyable sound, and the other recreated a more than decent facsimile of live musicians playing in my home. The other aspect of having systems that perform at this level is that small changes/upgrades (like going to Cat 8 Cable) play huge dividends, which counters the traditional thinking about the law of diminishing returns. My reference is not other hifi rigs, but live acoustic music played in small or home venues, which I used to attend regularly, and I tuned my ears to that.
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