"The Law of Diminishing Returns"???

Sometimes the law of diminishing returns has more to do with ones obsession rather than a certain price piont. I never thought that a 700.00 i/c would be bettered by a 1500.00 in a monetary sense, but after hearing the rightness of it. The 1500.00 i/c looks like a bargain in terms of musicality not to mention the high investment cost already attained.Can you live without the 1500.00 cord?? My answer is no because I've heard the sound difference and would feel slighted by the cheaper i/c. It is like that first grilfriend that one never really forgets!! All the best of holiday cheer everyone-Dennis

I can agree with Sean about modding components but does anyone here know how to do this? I would like to mod my Denon UD-M31 mini-system? I've asked at everysite I know with no responses.
Short of reading a bunch of books on power amp design, power supply design, we're pretty much stuck with what industry has to offer.

Cdc: It helps to have background in electronics when doing mods, otherwise one ends up spending time and money that they don't have to when working blindly. By working blindly, i'm talking about people simply pulling existing caps, diodes, etc... and replacing them all with higher grade parts of equivalent ratings. While that method surely works, it is both more time consuming and less cost efficient than being able to read a schematic and picking / choosing what parts would be the most critical in terms of upgrading. There are folks that i know that have done that though and literally replaced all of the caps and diodes in a device. While they were quite happy with the results, i'm sure that they could have achieved similar results for measurably less money. Sean
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Thanks Sean. Upgrading components is a good place to start. I liked your past ideas about ISO transformer but I think of:
1) better power supply / larger e-core transformer to replace torroidial. Naim and Cyrus both do this to upgrade their amps.
2) better shielding and placement of components.
3) better filtering caps. Maybe a bunch of smaller ones instead of a couple bigger ones. Again, more power and cleaner power.
Probably only an experienced EE could just open a component and see where the designer cut costs.

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