High End Myth Glossary.


Disclaimer:
Many of the glossary terms bellow are entered with little or no comments. Large comments might require large space and time investment. If anyone reading this glossary is offended, than I'll keep you a company as well. Every myth-paragraph bellow adds a price to the audiocomponent only without substantial improvements and "upgrades" to your system.

Feel free to add to the list bellow:

1. Cables' price should be arround 10...20% of the whole system i.e if the system costs $100k than $10...20k should be for interconnects and speaker cables.

2. Directional signal cables.

3. Zero Negative Feedback.

4. $10k 10Wpc amps.

5. No need for larger output power. Place compact system speaker into the plywood horn enclosure and use SET 1W/ch.

6. Tube watts v.s. SS watts.

7. CD-players or digital separates over $1.5k(Analogue sources stay somewhere next to but not to the same degree for example $10k cartridges)

8. Audiable differences in .3dB or in .5%THD v.s. .001%THD.

9. Auditioning of audio furniture.

10. Stereophile or other oriented magazines one-person "expert reviews"

11. $5000 Mark Levinson amp looks like it should sound excellent...

12. $12k CD-player reads CD with greater precision.

13. tubes $900/matched pr

14. amp stands $600/pr.

15. microphonic-free chasis, power interconnects and speaker wires. tubes and transistors can certainly be added as well.

16. wire reactance influence on audio freequencies.

17. Nirvana speaker wire has substantially less reactance than Home Depot.

18. S/N ratings of CD-player(larger than CD's dynamic range 16bit = only 60dB!)

P.S. I would be also glad to see Worst-of section in forums here.
128x128marakanetz
Here are some:

Cables are as important as circuit design.

You really don't need to understand a whit about circuit design or electrical engineering to intelligently evaluate different approaches by the various designers.

You can walk into an audition room and focus on the effect of one component alone, such as an amplifier, in a chain of many, and walk in to the same store another day, and focus on the effect of a different component, say a speaker, in the same chain of components.

Tone controls and room equalization can be made irrelevant by carefully choosing the right components.

Your ears and hearing are objective and stable listening devices.

"Burn-in" has nothing to do with your hearing and brain getting accustomed to a system, and everything to do with physical changes in components.

Live sound is better than home audio.

Home audio is a more essential experience than going to concerts.

That some speakers can blend with your furniture or are elegant furniture.

That WAF does not matter.
Here are my Myth's to add to the Glossary.

Audio Asylum is as good as Audiogon.

No one at Audiogon ever "trolls" by posting controversial topics.

Bose makes the ultimate speaker.
Albert wins hands down : )

Mscommerce's comments are WAY too serious for this type of thread. Very good, but WAY too serious : ) Sean
>
That the way "I" perceive the world is the identical way "you" perceive the world. Regardless of "proven" scientific facts the way we perceive those "facts" is ALL psychological: We create the way we perceive the world around us in each of our own heads, and those perceptions are more often as distinctive from one another as our fingerprints. There are no absolutes! The meanings we attach to virtually everything we perceive are uniquely our own.

With the singular exception of the undisputed superiority of the Western Electric 300B tube over all other 300B varieties, there is no right and no wrong! Of that I'm absolutely positive, and anyone who says otherwise is obviously a naive and foolish little person! :-p

....say Marakanetz, what kind of bait you using on those hooks?
Jax2,
Lookup at least 50 years back to find out how WE300B is $900/pr now and other mega-prices as well.

You'll certainly be able to subtract from psychological "psycho" thereafter and plenty of bait for different purposes.