Will try to, Jay doing an excellent job creating interest in music lovers which is really nice to see.
Fortunately for me cost would never limit my choices, but I love value because it always ties to the truth. My point with where I imagine Jay to be at in his journey is I don’t believe he has yet completely (and happy to be corrected if I am wrong ) had the epiphany that he keeps arriving at nearly the same destination with an almost infinite combination of gear when he stumbles on the right combo in his room, hence the Ref6 "stunning" experience. I would argue most of those experiences are falling back on something already attained.
Take his speakers and mystery class A amps in his current system. Despite what the designers claim, there have been literally zero disruptive changes in the design of both of those items in decades. Big boxed multi-ways with passive crossovers are still horribly inefficient transducers and distortion and phase generators. Mostly what they do is produce loss and the designer, especially the bigger they get, is tasked mostly with trying to contain the collateral damage to the signal as much as possible.
The amps we all preferred in the shootout are the same basic circuit design with multiple output devices from 40 years ago. Differing by design in the complexities of the driver stages and PS and the modes of feedback that companies attach fancy names to suggest breakthroughs. Priced by varying degrees of craftsmanship that we can all appreciate and value as well. Seasoned amp designers around in the 70’s still active might even claim what a pity it is that WC paid so much for output devices in those monoblocks that are likely inferior to the ones they had back in the day, or the stash they have in their closet waiting for their last amp they make for themselves before they hang it up.
Contrast that to the enormous disruption in the digital source space. Esoteric makers of DACs are scrambling to fill the 3 chassis 100lb DAC behemoths with god knows what of meaning as a remnant to the late 90’s when we all assumed the reason digital sucked so bad was moslty bad analog output stages. So the fad was to produce DAC’s with insanely overbuilt output stages equivalent to small power amps. Turned out the problem with digital was in fact digital.
Digital is being completely turned on its ear and 16/44 can now compete with good vinyl for one reason only, code, which takes up little space. High resolution DAC’s are now easily contained in reasonable boxes and are being fed incredibly high quality pre-processed data streams from other boxes not much more than nice quiet computers with mostly intellectual property inside residing in the FPGA code. DACs are teeing off on the quality of this stream as they are now freed from any processing, relegated to conversion only.
My guess was that Jay is eventually going to have increasing clarity of when his money is being put to work and when it is not. In most, that tends to change habits regardless of resources.
Fortunately for me cost would never limit my choices, but I love value because it always ties to the truth. My point with where I imagine Jay to be at in his journey is I don’t believe he has yet completely (and happy to be corrected if I am wrong ) had the epiphany that he keeps arriving at nearly the same destination with an almost infinite combination of gear when he stumbles on the right combo in his room, hence the Ref6 "stunning" experience. I would argue most of those experiences are falling back on something already attained.
Take his speakers and mystery class A amps in his current system. Despite what the designers claim, there have been literally zero disruptive changes in the design of both of those items in decades. Big boxed multi-ways with passive crossovers are still horribly inefficient transducers and distortion and phase generators. Mostly what they do is produce loss and the designer, especially the bigger they get, is tasked mostly with trying to contain the collateral damage to the signal as much as possible.
The amps we all preferred in the shootout are the same basic circuit design with multiple output devices from 40 years ago. Differing by design in the complexities of the driver stages and PS and the modes of feedback that companies attach fancy names to suggest breakthroughs. Priced by varying degrees of craftsmanship that we can all appreciate and value as well. Seasoned amp designers around in the 70’s still active might even claim what a pity it is that WC paid so much for output devices in those monoblocks that are likely inferior to the ones they had back in the day, or the stash they have in their closet waiting for their last amp they make for themselves before they hang it up.
Contrast that to the enormous disruption in the digital source space. Esoteric makers of DACs are scrambling to fill the 3 chassis 100lb DAC behemoths with god knows what of meaning as a remnant to the late 90’s when we all assumed the reason digital sucked so bad was moslty bad analog output stages. So the fad was to produce DAC’s with insanely overbuilt output stages equivalent to small power amps. Turned out the problem with digital was in fact digital.
Digital is being completely turned on its ear and 16/44 can now compete with good vinyl for one reason only, code, which takes up little space. High resolution DAC’s are now easily contained in reasonable boxes and are being fed incredibly high quality pre-processed data streams from other boxes not much more than nice quiet computers with mostly intellectual property inside residing in the FPGA code. DACs are teeing off on the quality of this stream as they are now freed from any processing, relegated to conversion only.
My guess was that Jay is eventually going to have increasing clarity of when his money is being put to work and when it is not. In most, that tends to change habits regardless of resources.