Audiophile Priorities and Recent Topics

Three_easy_payments:

I started out in this hobby when I bought Dyna70 and DynaPAS kits and built the stuff myself at the age of 14, back in the 1960s.

David Halfer’s Dynaco was built on the premise of simple (simple!) high quality design that was affordable. That ethos had largely vanished in the audio world of today.

The system that I have today is built on the foundation that I started out with 53 years ago. The premise is the same: don’t spend much, carefully shop to get the most for the dollar out of each compatible component.

The biggest recent improvement was a consequence of moving into a new home that needed a gut restoration. I have a room that is semi-anechoic, and the sound quality went up by a whopping 25% to 30%. All for the amount of money I was to spend anyway for thermal performance, about $2000.

Which would you choose?
$2000 on a room treatment for 25% improvement $2000 on cables for at best 5% improvement

see https://www.theaudioatticvinylsundays.com

I have tried expensive cable in the past. You will see that I found cable performance to be so negligible that I don’t bother to include them in my system component listing.

I thought until a few days ago that all of my cables were generic, except for some bottom of the barrel Monster. It turns out I still have Analysis Plus in there, connecting the table/SUT/preamp/amps from the last time I tried experimenting with cables, about 10 years ago, and completely forgot about them. 

cheers - unreceivedogma

apologies to those who by now have heard my mantra over and over, beaten into them with a baseball bat.

tvad :

Thanks for the shout out.
I’ll try to get to it within a week or so.

@unreceiveddogma  

Which would you choose?
$2000 on a room treatment for 25% improvement $2000 on cables for at best 5% improvement

Agreed on this example.  It strikes me that your focus would only shift to tweaks when you feel that you've done all you could in every other area of priority first.  What really got me motivated to start the thread was the premise posited by a few members who seemed to give a disproportionately large level of priority to areas that I thought would be the absolute last areas to focus on.  Seems many others agree.

Much appreciated...and cool website!

Three_easy_payments :

thx for the website shout out.

As inferred before, I built around a low cost, tube analog approach. As to speaker/amp synergy:

I started with the Dyna and a pair of Lafayette speakers. Moved up to a pair of Dyna MK IIIs, then Hafler mono blocs which were crap, back to the MK IIIs. Moved to a pair of Warfdales, then Altec 604Cs (1978), then the Futterman (1985), then Duntechs. The Duntechs and the Futtermans destroyed each other. Repaired the Futtermans, ditched the Duntechs, back to the 604Cs.

I recently had the Futtermans rebuilt by Jon Specter as triodes. He put in all new Jensen audio grade foil oil caps. I rebuild the 604s every 10 years. I asked Specter if I should change the impedance from 16 to 8, he said leave ‘em at 16, the Futtermans love efficiency. The Futtermans have been stable for 8 years now.

I started with building around the Dynas, got the 604Cs, loved ‘em, got the Futtermans and the Duntechs disaster led me to realize that the Altec/Futterman combo was a match made in heaven.

I know that Futterman/Quad is the classic combo, but I never liked the Quads.

I experimented with about a dozen cables in the 1990s/early 00s. To the extent that I heard a difference, I wondered if I was trying to hard to hear it. I should not have to make an effort to hear anything at $200 to $2000 per pair. Sorry! A waste of $s imho.

The only tweaks that I have done that made a difference is bolting the cabinet to a brick wall that the table sits on, and putting the Velodyne sub on springy rubber feet. That second one strikes me as counterintuitive but I guess that decoupling the sub from the building trumps resistance to movement: until then, the sub was turning the entire 3.5 story building into a subwoofer.