MSRP, diferentiation and the illusion of value

I don’t care what people think of my gear. It only has to please me. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I don’t get why people trashing something bothers someone. I believe here it’s often because there is some financial interest to defend. Just try saying anything negative about expensive fuses. The natives get restless. Happens every time. 

In the search for the best sound for your system you need to understand that a lot of audio guys will spend what they need to to enhance their system no matter the cost and if it makes you happy when you are finished that is all that matters.

As Harry Haller in Hesse’ Steppenwolf listens to Mozart explain, after Mozart places a transistor radio playing Handel on the table (substitute “audiophile system” for “radio”):

 Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando? An inspiration, eh? Yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of this ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like gods. And let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it peace. Just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention and you will learn something. Observe how this crazy funnel apparently does the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing in the world. It takes hold of some music played where you please, without distinction, stupid and coarse, lamentably distorted, to boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring. Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And now you hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by radio is, all the same, in this most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe, most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to radio you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine. Exactly, my dear sir, as the radio for ten minutes together projects the most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into respectable drawing rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling, yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips the music of its sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and be-slimes it and yet cannot altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It makes its unappetizing tone—slime of the most magic orchestral music. Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it.
This discussion/forum, reminds me of that passage…..in a good way!

Very great post....Thanks...

Deepest regards...

erik_squires are you suggesting folks use the cost to justify an emotional decision?

@mrklas

Not justify it but to gauge it’s value, so that the value can be placed alongside other wants. If we used Freud’s terms (as commonly translated to English) to allow the superego a moment to check the id’s desire to bankrupt you.

Best,

Erik