Words From the Wise

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Be less afraid if you never go into the ‘big’ room at the high end dealership. Everything will become much easier for you if you stay the heck out of there!
Learn to listen.
Learn to say “No.” if that’s not a strong suit for you… or just listen to your significant other more often.
Depending on how deeply you wish to injure yourself, er, get into this economically draining & psychologically debilitating distraction, parading as a normal past time, keep in mind that everything makes a difference. Everything! The room. The Cabling. The rack. The incoming power. Your ears. Pets. Neighbors. But most of all it could well be your own ego that winds up driving you to the poor house.
Find your own sound quickly. For some it’s tubes, for other’s it’s solid state. Further put, it’s SET amps & High eff speakers, still other’s will opt for digital or analog throughout. This means going to showrooms. Do bare in mind the ‘big room’ caveat. Self honesty here will pay dividends later on.
Great speakers can not fix upstream signal losses or problems.
Spending a lot is optional. Eg., ego. Spending wisely is better.
Mate speakers to the room, amps to speakers.
Putting money into room acoustical treatments is just about a ‘must’ to reap the true benefits from your system.
The best barometer for how good a system is will be the width of the smile on your face, the amount of toe tapping going on while listening, and the difficulty you have with turning off your rig. When that becomes a routine, daily event, you are finished and should then seek out another hobby to master, and allow your present audio contrivance provide you the pleasure it should at that point, rather than allowing it to nag you for more time and money to be sunk into it.

1. Room Treatment and speakers positioning are very, very important. Room resonances must be eliminated at least partially.

2. A good subwoofer can greatly augment the pleasure you take in the music listening. Patience is required here though, because it's hard to integrate a sub into the room/system.

3. Listen to the music in the dark with your eyes closed.

4. Buy used components.

5. Give a chance to other music genres which you normally don't listen to.
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Stop moving things around, stop touching and changing cables and leave your system playing and playing and playing for months!!! I repeat DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING, even when cleaning the dust watch out so that you dont really move things...

A system get better and better the more its components work together...

1. Learn how to listen to music. If you haven't all ready, stop cranking tunes and listen to the music. May seem simple but it's not. It takes practice. Sit down for it.
2. Don't be afraid to buy used.
3. Explore music. If you only listen to one genre of music, you're system won't be worth as much to you.
4. Don't ignore room treatments. Too much bass doesn't mean replace your speakers.
5. If you live in the U.S., you owe it to yourself and this country to try out some U.S. designed and manufactured gear. There's some truly amazing stuff out there.

1) Similar to Thermonicavenger thoughts, if your music doesn't sound quite right and you're a graying boomer, get your hearing checked. You may find out that your hi freqs are not what they were when you were 20 years old. 2) Ask your wife to sit in the manchair and listen to your system. When you ask her what you hear and she says music, you may have tinitus. But she'll have saved you a boat load of $$ trying to clean up the noise. 3) Losing part of my freqs and tinitus has made me appreciate music in a different way. If you can lose yourself in beautiful music to such a point that the ringing seems to vanish, you put together a good system for you. 4) Enrich your Family in music, and be interested in what your kids listen to. It may sound like noise but they'll appreciate your interst. 5) Dean Martin.