What has been your costliest mistake in this hobby?

Rekindled my audio pastime.  Bought speakers, good deal.  Bought amp, touched speaker wires together, blew amp.  Fixed under warranty, whew!.  Heard a strange fuzziness and ringing..sent inter connects back and passive preamp back(that I now don't need and sold) nothing wrong.  Never did figure that one out.  Sent in crossover because of fuzziness/ringing.  Got new op amps and a checkover for $160, a bargain.  Cat busted off my banana plugs on my speakers twice, now have spades.  Nice vender fixed for ZERO.  Bought streamer on Amazon, then bought Bluesound.  Sold original for almost new cost.  $10 loss, another whew!  Making homemade sound panels on the cheap and buying cheap bass traps,  Loss of $300.  So moral of the story is I dealt with good people and it didn't cost me much except chasing phantoms and changing gear in and out.  And now I have about $8k in everything and it sounds pretty darn good!!  All comes with the territory and it gave this newly retired guy something to do last winter.

I wouldn't necessarily call this a mistake.  But, I was shipping via USPS a non-working naim uniti serve music service back to Naim for repair.  I had a tracking number and shipping insurance.  It never arrived at Naim for repair.  The USPS lost the item.

I filed for an insurance claim and the USPS claimed that my receipt was not adequate.  They did not accept the Audiogon receipt I supplied.

Understand, that I originally purchased the item used from another Audiogon member, and Audiogon supplied their receipt after purchase.  Well, guess what, USPS not only lost the item, but wouldn't honor their insurance (which I paid for).

enjoy

Reading and believing reviewers that affirm that Hi-Fi experience and S.Q. experience being related to electronic design quality and progress only is mainly for those who can pay for it...


Totally false, but when you enter in this course to upgrade the electronic design of any part in the audio system, you forgot the essentials : any relatively good system will give to you an extraordinary experience if you embed it correctly, even at a relatively low price...

All audio magazines are market condioning mainly... They sell ready made branded products, they dont explain the basics and the methods to embed them, this will kill the urge to upgrade.... :)


Very costly for those customers who believes the gospel...

:)

My post dont negate the value of a good electronic design and his logical pricing at all, but my post negates the fact that this will constitute the MAIN of all audio factors for the S.Q. experience....

Electronic quality design progress dont exceed the  acoustical embedding  importance... Ask any acoustic engineer,  speakers cannot replace the room.... 

@elliott sell them here on the Gon as a bulk lot, plenty of us have cd rippers and or players... give it a whirl in lots of 100 or the book by book approach
best to you
jim

In about 2000 I sold my entire system after my daughter was born and gave my sound room in our house at the time for her bedroom. I had Vandersteen 2CE's Audible Illusions Pre Calif audio labs DAC and transport and sold it all for Rotel surround receiver and energy surround speaker system. That lasted about 6 months. I miss tubes