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Happen to you? Gear chasing because the fundamentals were wrong.

Gear chasing and swapping can be a real joy or a real pain. 
The search for "better" or just the search for the "right fit" or sound.
One thing I've learned (with some difficulty) is that there are some fundamentals which have to be in place if anything else is going to be accurately assessed.

Of these, amp-speaker synergy and room acoustics were the most obvious factors I neglected. Noise and isolation were also missed as critical, early on. I blamed components which really were not the cause or the solution to the situation because I was missing the fundamentals.

I'm curious to hear anecdotes of your discovery.

What fundamental did you fail to pay attention to which caused you to chase gear unnecessarily?

Hopefully, these stories will be instructive, especially for newer audiophiles.

128x128hilde45
digsmithd
913 posts
 

Good post...and should be read/considered by any guy buying audio gear/cables.

I guess for myself ...I found myself buying speaker cables to fix the up stream/power short comings.Ounce i got some of the mess "right power cables" figured out...even a "budget" pair of speaker cables sound descent...Fwiw.

curiousjim's avatar
curiousjim
4,640 posts
 

Back in the seventies and eighties, I listened to my dealer and he never let me down. Now he’s moved to Florida and I am without a local dealer I trust, so now I do as much research as I can and have so far been happy with my purchases.

decooney
1,964 posts
 

If I had to do it all over again past 45yrs in audio gear chasing, I would have started by stepping up a little more $ on higher quality and better matched sources and amplification [sooner]. Building my own speakers since the beginning, a few nicer source-players and amps along the way sure would have helped me to realize a few key things around sound and music much sooner. Once i did, my own speakers started to sing for the 1st time in a very nice way. Lesson learned late.

An old buddy pulled me in to listen to his new source and new tube amps once, it was game over. Learning from others who cycle gear and take detailed notes is helpful to get going in a better direction, sooner. The OP knows this too. :) 

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richardt9000
9 posts
 

I'm newer to this than most of you, but chasing wattage and not understand speaker sensitivity were the two biggest for me at first. Once I got that out of the way, the next revelation for me recently is the quality of DAC. A/B testing was a bit shocking. When I do upgrade, I could see myself stretching more for one than I would on an amp.

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