Best Forum to hear experienced audiophiles exchange thoughts?


I don't want to say I have outgrown this site but I do know

I want more. 

 

There are many other sites but where are the forums where people

talk about new gear? What's Best is terrible to try to maneuver thru.

 

Others??

 

Best,

 

128x128jeffseight

People with experience and knowledge tend to write in a way that exhibits that. I've started many threads here, and when my OP was carefully worded, the responses would typically lead to a coherent and informative exchange of views. This does not always happen but it frequently does. Check my threads to see what I mean.

The other thing an OP can do is to steer conversations back on track by restating the question or by summarizing what's been said that answers it. 

In other words, a good thread takes work and some minding by the OP. When people throw a vague question out there and then find they're in the middle of a food fight, that's not totally their fault but there's some need for additional due diligence.

If you want to talk about mostly HE and New gear, I would suggest AudioShark.org run by the owner of Suncoast Audio in Sarasota.

Audio forums can be tough on several fronts. There’s all the usual conflicts of humans discussing something. Audio topics are especially subjective, and very personal. There are many different views and variables going on, and some people see only one possible way for something to be acceptable....their way. If you’re happy with your system, you’ve succeeded in audio, but there will always be someone who thinks maybe you’re really not happy, or shouldn’t be happy.

Add to the human and preference differences the fact that we’re at different places in our audio journey. I’ve enjoyed every system I ever had for some reason or another, even though they weren’t as good as what I have now. Some people buy a system, like it, and enjoy it for as long as the components keep working. Other’s are prone to swapping and moving on to the next best thing. So it’s possible to be "into audio" for 25 years, yet do very little experimentation, where much of the learning comes from.

There’s also a strong emotional element that influences our opinions. If you associate a particular piece or a system with positive experiences, you’ll have fond memories of it even if there’s nothing special sonically to justify the emotion. We’re human.

It’s simply very difficult to gauge where someone is on their journey, or to explain in objective terms what you’re subjectively hearing...I suspect that’s one of the reasons people lean on measurements, which brings us back to the many variables and perspective involved in audio.

I wish I had a good answer about where best to discuss audio with an experienced crowd.  It can be a moving target and is something that we sort of each need to define and discover on our own.  Any forum is only as good as the current discussion, and the particular folks influencing the discussion...and that is another variable that's not even necessarily audio related.