Help: ISO Beginner full setup for excellent sound on $2000 max budget
Do you have any suggestions for what you’d spend $ on, what you think might sound good if you went over to a friend’s house who had some cash to spend that wants to become a low-level audiophile? Best advice I can give, quality beats quantity. Across the board. I’ll use the tube amp and speakers you like for example so you understand just how deep this goes. Those speakers use one full range driver. Too many inexperienced audiophiles look at that and say no bass. I look at that and say one driver. One driver means all the driver budget went into that one driver. They only had to cut one hole. There’s no crossover network. Without knowing anything else I can tell you that speaker probably sounds pretty damn good for the money. It probably won’t play real loud, or go real deep. But what it does do it will do mesmerizingly good. You will sit and sink into the music and forget all about what it doesn’t do because it does what it does do so well. Same goes for that amp. Look at the Six Moons review. Look at what’s inside that amp. You don’t know this stuff but I do. Its enough for you to know there’s hardly any parts. Very few parts means more money per part. This goes right down to the inputs. At this price range every dollar spent on an RCA is a dollar not spent where it will impact the sound, which is caps and resistors and transformers. There’s even better reasons to favor a nice little integrated like this and I will let you in on it but not yet too soon. Normally I say what I said at first, divide the budget evenly. That was from years of experience. Recently some new developments have changed things a bit. Its still super important to attend to every detail. In the past that meant buying quality power cord, interconnect and speaker cables. Now though there is another way to get that same performance from cheap budget wire. It has the advantage of making your whole system sound embarrassingly good. Your friend will be envious, and guaranteed never figure out what you did unless you tell him. You will be surprised to find your modest system sounds better than systems that cost many times what you paid. Not kidding. Don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner. Look at my system. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 Let me know if you’re still interested. |
@millercarbon, I saw your system and read some comments folks have left about you. You seem like the exact person I want to talk to about this. I'm in your world. Budget sucks, but I'm transitioning into a new career and have to go back to school again so I'm wanting something that I can listen to when I'm studying in my living room, or studying in my bedroom. I'm wanting the warmest, most inviting sound in my living room with that budget. I understand the importance of investing in quality, and I want to do that as best I can within the parameters I'm bound by. I'll post some of my favorite songs below to give you a sense of the music style I listen to on a regular basis. Maybe that speaker and amp might be what I should invest in. The buddy who has this setup listens to very similar music to me. In an ideal world, I would like a set up that can pull out depth in songs like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy8cklFZ3sA |
