I wonder how many people who have read this 9 year old thread still do not have a "Tunable System"? I wonder how many who have posted and read 20 or more years ago still don't have a "Tunable System"?Thousands of threads posted and the same people asking how to get something they don't have.
Buy a line conditioner, get this or that speaker, amp, DAC, wire, table....and still not understanding that this media is variable. Millions upon millions of $$$$$ spent on something that doesn't even exist. HEA is a price tag and nothing else. And the blame game :). Let's blame recordings, engineers and low budgets for bad sound. The blind in this hobby will do anything not to see. Desperate to justify their spending. Folks so desperate that they are spending even more money to try to justify their spending. And, every audiophile out there knows that there will come a day that you will put on a great recording and it will sound terrible on your over built over priced system. There's absolutely no way around it, you are going to play a great recording and it is going to sound terrible. And, even though the cause is staring you right in the ears you go on saying a system that only knows how to play one sound can't be at fault.
You my friends are no longer a part of the audiophile majority, but instead the ever shrinking crowd that is paddling your way into obscurity. The rest of us who tune, either through DSP, Equalization or Physically or all of the above, hear a recording that sounds off and we correct it. We have the ability to make the necessary adjustments to our liking while you keep messing with an idea that never worked and never will. The idea that all recordings sound the same and or have the same values never ever existed. It was just a group of reviewers piping a dream of "wouldn't it be nice" and some how the audio designers lost their minds and delivered a false premise. They delivered products that were incomplete by design when plugged together. They never stopped to ask "how do I play a variable medium through a discrete system". Instead this hobby settled for only being able to play a few recordings very well, some ok, and even more horribly out of tune.
Listing how much you have spent on a component or the brand means absolutely Zip in a hobby that requires Acoustical, Mechanical and Electrical variability to play back recordings. Oh but keep playing and we will see you in another 9 years asking the same questions and giving the same advice, with probably only one change. Half of this generation will be dead and gone and most of the other half will have discovered how the hobby of playback really works.
Michael Green