Hi-end audio is a big zero

I wanted SET sound with Magnapan speakers (0.7 with DWMs are the biggest I can fit into my little 26-foot-diameter house.) I could not bring my amplifier to audition it because it has too many separate components: twin KV power supplies, cathode heaters that are filtered with 4 Farad capacitors, and two more chassis for drivers of the radio station transmitter triodes it would take to drive Magnepans. When I brought the speakers home, I got a better sound than the solid-state amplifier available at the store. Later Wendell Dillard and his wife came to the store and gave a seminar on the Magnepan speakers. I brought photographs of my SET with triodes the size of quart jars and he and his wife laughed their asses off calling it wild. His wife said that such a setup would have terrible wife acceptance factor. Fortunately, my wife let me get away with the Jules Verne style of stereo gear I build.

It’s high end in name only if the customer service is poor. Plain and simple

'High End' is a term that can only be useful to gauge price.

It has very little relationship to high performance.

We've seen time and time again that performance and price have a very tenuous relationship at best.

Go to a show and hear it for yourself.

It's only magazines and dealers that want to propagate the myth that performance and price are closely linked.

I suspect almost all of us would think our systems are high performance but would any of us want to claim that our systems were High End?

High-end is indeed a big zero.

@cd318 , that is a BIG claim when you group every "magazine and dealer" into a pile of myth propagators. If you are telling me that I can get champagne on a beer budget, I am happy to partake, please post a link to the oasis of sweet deals.

If it is just the term "high end" I suppose you could substitute "luxury" or "reference class". I think one component where it is easy to spot "high end" is home theater.

Its the total package, the experience, it isn’t a turntable or a dac or speakers. Luxury baby, all the way. I really enjoy going through the Virtual Systems here to see what other members are doing. I like and aspire to "high end", why else would we all have OCD about this hobby? Low end?

WHAT YOU NEED to get you-are-there sound is MONEY (start saving up) and TIME. Start with an inexpensive pair of speakers and an integrated amp, free wire, etc. and music that you like. The finest recordings can transform the final result more than any other single thing so start there. THEN spend most of your free time going to as many shops as possible. When you're ready to spend much more money than you swore at 1st you wouldn't do, you become an official audiophile. Does this sound crazy? Absolutely!  It's all a very irrational and supremely expensive endeavor. But (as in my case) once I got out of mid-fi and bought a Levinson amplifier, the difference was worth the extra money because my ears were better able to discern the subtle textures and details in the recordings that came from living breathing musicians. If this doesn't sound like fun, that's fine. Once upon a time I asked a college friend if he could at least move his bookshelf speakers off of the floor so they weren't pointed at my shoes, and he immediately resented my suggestion. But he had some good music in his collection, so I just never mentioned it again. Dorm-room music is a genre all its own...