Audio Lessons Learned - post your best advice for the newer members!

"I have been an audiophile since the mid 80's.
Trust your ears."


+1

In the late 1960s, when I was 14, I built a Dyna70, a Dyna PAS and then added a pair of Lafayette speakers, a Garard table and a Stanton cartridge. My system evolved over the next 30 years, see theaudioatticvinylsundays.com while being committed to a tube analog sound, and has stayed more or less the same for 20 years (there was a destination), except for adding a semi-anechoic room 3 years ago.

The idea being: decide on an approach, then stick with it.

Don't equate higher price with better sound. I spent quite a bit of time and money trying to best my rather modest original set-up that I sold. Eventually got it right, but it was infuriating, and time consuming. 

An excellent thread with much valuable advice on offer. 

Audio can be a bewildering and complicated interest to get into and it's very tempting to seek external advice. Could save time and money in getting you where you want to go.

However, audio is also a business and there are many vested financial interests proffering advice which may be entirely misleading, if not unnecessarily financially ruinous for little or no sonic gain.

Another good place to start might be Peter Aczel's infamous article. Below is a truncated version but you can still read it in its entirety here. Even after many years I can't find anything in to disagree with.

I'd strongly recommend any newcomer to put aside any reservations and read it through several times before embarking upon an audio journey that will probably last a lifetime.

https://www.biline.ca/audio_critic/audio_critic_web1.htm#acl

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What I have learned after six decades in audio (call it my journalistic legacy): 
Audio is a mature technology. 

The implementation keeps improving to this day, but conceptually there is very little, perhaps nothing, really new.

I have been through all phases of implementation—shellac records via crystal pickups, LPs via magnetic and moving-coil pickups, CDs, SACDs, Blu-rays, downloads, full-range and two/three/four-way mono/stereo/ multichannel speakers, dynamics, electrostatics, ribbons (shall I go on?)—and heard incremental improvements most of the time, but at no point did the heavens open up and the seraphim blow their trumpets.

That I could experience only in the concert hall and not very often at that. Wide-eyed reviewers who are over and over again thunderstruck by the sound of the latest magic cable or circuit tweak are delusional. The principal determinants of sound quality in a recording produced in the last 60 years or so are the recording venue and the microphones, not the downstream technology.

The size and acoustics of the hall, the number and placement of the microphones, the quality and level setting of the microphones will have a much greater influence on the perceived quality of the recording than how the signal was captured—whether on analog tape, digital tape, hard drive, or even direct-to-disk cutter; whether through vacuum-tube or solid-state electronics; whether with 44.1-kHz/16-bit or much higher resolution.

The proof of this can be found in some of the classic recordings from the 1950s and 1960s that sound better, more real, more musical, than today’s average super-HD jobs.

Lewis Layton, Richard Mohr, Wilma Cozart, Bob Fine, John Culshaw, where are you now that we need you? 
The principal determinants of sound quality in your listening room, given the limitations of a particular recording, are the loudspeakers—not the electronics, not the cables, not anything else.

This is so fundamental that I still can’t understand why it hasn’t filtered down to the lowest levels of the audio community. 
Cables—that’s one subject I can’t discuss calmly. Even after all these years, I still fly into a rage when I read “$900 per foot” or “$5200 the pair.” That’s an obscenity, a despicable extortion exploiting the inability of moneyed audiophiles to deal with the laws of physics.

The transmission of electrical signals through a wire is governed by resistance, inductance, and capacitance (R, L, and C). That’s all, folks!

What about the miles of AC wiring from the power station to your house and inside your walls?

Only the six-foot length of the thousand-dollar power cord counts?

The lack of common sense in the high-end audio market drives me to despair. 
Loudspeakers are a different story. No two of them sound exactly alike, nor will they ever. All, or at least nearly all, of the conflicting claims have some validity.

Imagine a theoretically perfect loudspeaker that has an anechoic response like a point source, producing exactly the same spherical wave front at equal levels at all frequencies.

If a pair of such speakers were brought into a normally reverberant room with four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, they wouldn’t sound good! They would only be a good start, requiring further engineering. It’s complicated.

Loudspeakers are the only sector of audio where significant improvements are still possible and can be expected.

I suspect that (1) further refinements of radiation pattern will result in the largest sonic benefits and (2) powered loudspeakers with electronic crossovers will end up being preferred to passive-crossover designs.

In any case, one thing I am fairly sure of: No breakthrough in sound quality will be heard from “monkey coffins” (1970s trade lingo), i.e. rectangular boxes with forward-firing drivers.

I’ll go even further: Even if the box is not rectangular but some incredibly fancy shape, even if it’s huge, even if it costs more than a luxury car, if it’s sealed or vented and the drivers are all in front, it’s a monkey coffin and will sound like a monkey coffin—boxy and, to varying degrees, not quite open and transparent. 

Amplifiers have been quite excellent for more than a few decades, offering few opportunities for engineering breakthroughs. There are significant differences in topology, measured specifications, physical design, and cosmetics, not to mention price, but the sound of all properly designed units is basically the same. 

The point is that, unless the amplifier has serious design errors or is totally mismatched to a particular speaker, the sound you will hear is the sound of the speaker, not the amplifier.

As for the future, I think it belongs to highly refined class D amplifiers, such as Bang & Olufsen’s ICEpower modules and Bruno Putzeys’s modular Hypex designs, compact and efficient enough to be incorporated in powered loudspeakers. 

The gullibility of audiophiles is what astonishes me the most, even after all these years.

How is it possible, how did it ever happen, that they trust fairy-tale purveyors and mystic gurus more than reliable sources of scientific information?

It wasn’t always so.

Between the birth of “high fidelity,” circa 1947, and the early 1970s, what the engineers said was accepted by that generation of hi-fi enthusiasts as the truth. Then, as the ’70s decade grew older, the self-appointed experts without any scientific credentials started to crawl out of the woodwork. For a while they did not overpower the educated technologists but by the early ’80s they did, with the subjective “golden-ear” audio magazines as their chief line of communication.

I remember pleading with some of the most brilliant academic and industrial brains in audio to fight against all the nonsense, to speak up loudly and brutally before the untutored drivel gets out of control, but they just laughed, dismissing the “flat-earthers” and “cultists” with a wave of the hand.

Now look at them!

Talk to the know-it-all young salesman in the high-end audio salon, read the catalogs of Audio Advisor, Music Direct, or any other high-end merchant, read any of the golden-ear audio magazines, check out the subjective audio websites—and weep.

The witch doctors have taken over.

Even so, all is not lost. You can still read Floyd Toole and Siegfried Linkwitz on loudspeakers, Douglas Self and Bob Cordell on amplifiers, David Rich (hometheaterhifi.com) on miscellaneous audio subjects, and a few others in that very sparsely populated club. (I am not including The Audio Critic, now that it has become almost silent.) Once you have breathed that atmosphere, you will have a pretty good idea what advice to ignore. 
When I go to Verizon Hall in the Kimmel Center in Philadephia and sit in my favorite seat to listen to the Philadelphia Orchestra, I realize that 137 years after the original Edison phonograph audio technology still hasn’t quite caught up with unamplified live music in a good acoustic venue.

To be sure, my state-of-the-art stereo system renders a startlingly faithful imitation of a grand piano, a string quartet, or a jazz trio, but a symphony orchestra or a large chorus?

Close but no cigar. 
My greatest disappointment after six decades as an audio journalist is about today’s teenagers and twentysomethings. Most of them have never had a musical experience! I mean of any kind, not just good music.

Whether they are listening to trash or Bach, they have no idea what the music sounds like in real life. The iPods, iPads, iPhones, and earbuds they use are of such low audio quality that what they hear bears no relationship to live music.

And if they think that going to an arena “concert” to hop around in one square foot of space with their arms raised is a live-music experience, they are sadly deluded. It’s the most egregiously canned music of all. 

Please, kids, listen to unamplified live music just once!

—Peter Aczel

Know that the most important component of any system is your ears - take care of them now. When they begin to go you can't get them back, at least not fully; hearing aids can help, but they are certainly no substitute for the real thing. Practice routine professional maintenance just like the rest of your body, no different than your eyes, teeth, etc.  

If you are married, and/or have a family, make sure they are on board with your hobby.  If not, you are better off with a dedicated room you can escape to in order to enjoy your system.  Trying to placate a disinterested wife or prying kids off your speakers takes all the joy out of listening.  

When choosing between two pieces of gear and your preference is one that costs 'a bit more', buy it.  Sooner or later there's a good chance you'll regret not doing so. You'll be stuck with the lesser piece then sell it to get what you truly prefer.  Money lost.