When is your Hifi good enough?

"But then the next music starts to play and I start thinking, "This would sound so much better if...." and I start fidgeting."

Is it safe to assume its not just the variation of quality from recording to recording that accounts for this?  

I find when I think things are good enough,  I can clearly hear the differences good and bad from recording to recording and I am pretty much getting the most I can out of each.   That can be hard to know for sure.  In general,  when I hear only good things happening in the best recordings overall, I tend to conclude that most limitations or issues I might hear in others are the recordings fault, and there is little one can do to reproduce something that is not there in the first place.

As a technically oriented and analytically minded person, I find myself making such determinations in a manner similar to the manner in which the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said he distinguishes between pornography and Constitutionally protected free speech: "I know it when I see it." Or in this case hear it. Although the results of such determinations tend to change every now and then.

:-)

Best regards,
-- Al
 

Al, I am similar I think.

I often say you have to know what your target is before you can hit it.

Once you hit it, what more is there? Until you stop hitting it. Then the question becomes why? It could just be us having a bad day or going through a bad time. Or something with the power, weather, who knows? All the more reason to not jump to conclusions too quickly with this stuff. Its often very nebulous why things sound the way they do to us. The equipment merry go round is never a good answer. You have to be able to get off that from time to time. Unless one just likes to play with different gear, which is fine.

Also I agree with dweller.   I can enjoy listening to anything for a period as long as no audible distortion.  What floats ones boat beyond that is highly subjective I would say.   Many tasty ways to make soup, in either small or large portions.  large portions tend to cost more though if equally tasty.

I interpret this question as a variation of "at what point does diminishing returns start to set in?"  I take it as axiomatic that any system, from the intro audiophile to those pushing the SOTA, can be improved upon.  For me it comes down to a case of incremental money spent and added system complexity versus current enjoyment levels.  I look at some people's system pages and they have listed 30+ components (including tweaks) in single source systems.  I just don't want a system that has that many variables.  Nor do I want to spend $100k plus either.  I became an audiophile when $5,000 was a very expensive component and only a single company made a loudspeaker costing more than $10,000.  When I listen to systems costing multiples of what my current setup costs I marvel at the sound, but I still find myself perfectly content with what I have.

Among people who post here I suspect I'm a little more forgiving of sound quality than most.  To give an example, I recently had to replace a tube in my preamp so I ran the system without a preamp with the D/A going directly into the power amp.  I strongly prefer the sound of the system with the preamp, but it still sounded great without it and after a few days of acclimation I really didn't miss the preamp.  Push come to shove I could live with my Fisher 400/Monitor Audio Studio 20 system as my only system.  That system does everything Dweller outlines in his post.  But then again, that's just me.

Mapman,

You make a good point that applies to me:

Is it my system or is it the recording? 

In the future I will keep that in mind and will attempt to answer that question first before I do anything else.

Something I never expected from this hobby has been the realization that hifi reveals poor recordings. It reminded me of when I was a young man how I avoided Motown cassettes/8-tracks because they sounded so awful and CBS/Columbia tapes usually sounded better than other labels. I had forgotten how disappointed I was when I first obtained Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions" on tape. Whoah! That hiss!

Thanks,