Rpg wrote: he was constantly trying to find the perfect sound from his audio system
Art Dudley has long been one of my favorite writers in the field, and in the introduction to his review of some modestly priced preamps (HiFi Heretic, number eight, 1987) he made a distinction between hifi as a means of bringing music into your home, and hifi as a "jockishly obsessive exercise where what you have in mind is to keep trading gear season after season, with even new components viewed from the start as mere stations along the way." Paraphrasing a bit to shorten it up, he contended that investing in a mid-priced system--and stopping there--is a perfectly satisfactory way of bringing music into your home. The goal of hifi should be to assemble a real music system you can keep and enjoy, and not be just another pastime you can dump cash into.
A good dealer can really help sort this out, and I'm grateful to the dealer who helped me 25 years agot to 1) define my priorities (pacing, rhythmic drive, tunefulness, and microdynamics were more important to me than soundstaging, frequency extension, macrodynamics, and hyper detail); 2) determine the system needed to meet my level of musical expectation (that is, what level of quality and price was it going to take to keep me happy); and 3) devise a plan of starter system and upgrades over time (as budget allowed) to get me where I wanted to be with minimal loss along the way.
It took three years, but I eventually got my preferred system (all Linn, LP12/Ittok/LK1/LK2/Saras), and it provided musical satisfaction virtually unchanged (job layoff led to selling the Ittok LVII to pay a bill, but I was later able to sell my original LP12 to help fund getting the LVIII/2 and a Cirkus LP12) for about 20 years.
Age and use took its toll, and two years ago I put together a new system, but less systematically and with the priority of "buying American" (in response to the President's stimulus spending plea) rather than focusing strictly on the sonic attributes most important to me. It's not a bad system, and it does some things better than my all-Linn gear did (width and depth of soundstage, image localization, richer tonality, detail retrieval), but rather than satisfy me for 20 years, I'm already getting the itch for change. I think it's time to head back to the dealers, re-focus on what's most important to me in reproducing music, and make a new plan for bringing music into my home.
Avguy wrote: I can still remember the days when Bose used to make me and my entire family so happy...
When I brought home a pair of Bose 301's a few months ago, mainly as something cheap to support the new plasma TV in my bedroom, and found that they made music through my main system more rather than less enjoyable, I realized I had gone awry in assembling my system.
