Happy Scale

After I moved out of my parents house the search for happiness in the audio world began for me. In 1981, I was able to afford to buy a rack system at Circuit City. It was a Fisher tuner, tape deck, turn table and speakers. I was happy. Then I read a review of a pair of Polk Audio speakers and the reviewer mentioned how the imaging and sound stage was amazing while listening to Pink Floyd The Wall. Imaging? Sound Stage? What? I thought it was cool that I heard the cash register alternating from left to right speaker while listening to Money from the Dark Side of the Moon. That was stereo to me. What were all these other attributes I was missing? I was no longer happy. I ended up with a Harman Kardon PM645 integrated amp, a Sony CD player and Infinity Kappa 7 speakers. Imaging...check, sound stage, wide and open and deep....check. Wow! What a difference. Happy again! A few moves and years later, I lost interest in serious listening and my son took my speakers and amp to college with him and I lost them forever. Now I'm back to listening again and started out with a Harman Kardon 7.1 amp and Klipsch RF5000 speakers with a Onkyo C7030 CD player. Decent, but I wasn't happy. I ended up selling all that off and got a NAD C380 amp, Cambridge Audio Azur 651 CD player and KLH Kendall speakers...much better, but I still wasn't hearing what I wanted to hear. I invested in room treatments from GIK and I was happy for a short time because the the treatments did deepen and widen my sound stage significantly. I decided to try another amp. I went with a Hegel H390 this time. Happiness in a 50 lb box. Everything was better, dynamics, staging and imaging. I thought I was happy...then I started playing around with the room treatment positioning and I stumbled onto pure gold. Just one move that made an incredible difference in depth and width of the sound stage, bass, vocals. I am happy....again...for now....lol. Speakers maybe?....STOP!

@baclaggGotta love room treatments!

Worked for me to.

Noone.  The lead singer with Herman's Hermits.

@hombre, a lot of my current stuff is pro audio.  It may not be 'pretty', but functionality is a tad more important for me....

That, and the specs are specs.  The 'pros' live and fail by them to a greater degree than we do.  You don't got to concerts to listen to 'meh' sound....

They Have to sound Great.  We just want to sound better...in our own ways and means.....;)

When my wife passed away five years ago I mistakenly thought if I spent over $30k on a new system it would help bring happiness back into my life. I did enjoy assembling the system, but when I sat to listen to my music it only brought back memories of times we were together. The memories are great, but the loss tore me apart. It didn’t provide the happiness I was looking for. Nothing would. Not for years. Looking back I realize I wasn’t thinking clearly and was grasping at anything to help pull me out of the depression I was in.

I now listen to that system every day for hours and hours. Every day.  For hours and hours.  It is my sanity.