My 18 propositions to reach satisfaction at low cost :
1. No speakers beat the room...
2. Integrate can be good and pre-amp can be good too... Tubes or S.S. or classD can be good each one of them... No competition exist between good alternatives, only different propositions for different needs...There is many tubes design as there is very different S.S. design ; bad and good one... Fanatics of a brand name excluding anything else are acoustic ignorant very often...
3.Dont upgrade BEFORE the rightful control of the three embeddings dimension : mechanical, acoustical and electrical..
4. Cables and power cord are only component tools they dont replace embeddings controls nor real upgrades, treat them as useful tool working as components..Then refrain to pay too much for them...
5. Turntable or Dac, quality exist in these two formats if we stay under 50,000 bucks ... let audiophile with no limit to their wallet decide that vinyl is better at the endgame ...Who want a 100,000 bucks system anyway ? Not me, if i think with sanity...I am not Bill Gates...
6. Remember that there exist very expansive system that sound not so good and even bad... Guess why reading the 5 other points... And remember that those who claim that no audiophile experience exist with an inexpansive system ignore acoustics, ignore what is synergy, they ignore what were the top audio components of the past not available at low costs and then they are at best not creative...Buying to solve problems is not always creative...
7. Buying is more easy than thinking...Especially in audio...
8. The best way to acess audiophile realm at peanuts cost is learning acoustic enough and designing your own room... I know because i did it once...It takes me one year 7 day by 7 day for sure... I was retired... i had all my time... But tuning all takes me a lot of time... I designed homemade 100 resonators each one tuned... The results were 3-D sound all around the room... With better speakers it would have been even better ... But it was so much good that it trash all my headphones... Audiophile experience cost something , if not money, it cost time , and studies....
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9. The sound experience come more from all the working components in relation with the room and the ears...It is why putting a price tag on audiophile experience is preposterous... Acoustics is more important than the specs of the component... I suppose here that we are passed a minimal quality threshold of the basic components for sure to begin with... It is why boasting about the difference between a 25 000 bucks components versus a 50,000 bucks one is most of the time meaningless marketing...Read me right here, i dont claim that there is no differences between these 2 components...I say that the difference in quality matter less than the mechanical,electrical,and acoustical embeddings very often...
Most audio S.Q. come from the right embeddings for specific ears...Thats is my point...A psycho-acoustical point more important than the price tag...
10. if your system is already good , dont upgrade anything buy a BACCH filters system and call your audiophile journey done...it is my recommendation for a relatively costly real upgrade if you want one at all cost... I dont need one now... I will be tempted though... Dr. Choueri is a genius read about him... 😊
11. In general invest 10 times more money in music than in gear...Doing this will make you creative enough to create low cost solutions... My greatest luck was not having money to buy all audiophile design i wanted to... I studied and became creative and learned... Reading a user manual is not learning... Reading basic acoustic is...
12, Placebo effect create miracles : what you have create yourself sound always better than what you only bought without adding anything coming from you...Only ignorant mock people attributing to their experience the "placebo effect" qualitative when they means in fact the concept of deception and illusion...Ignorant dont understand a so deep and complex concept as the "placebo" effect which is anything save deceptive and illusory , the opposite of what they means ... I will not go further here...
13. audio experience is not subjective nor objective, it is less related to the separate gear than related to your working experiments when you LEARN how to hear and LISTEN...
14. audio experience confuse and conflate OFTEN three distinct vocabularies : audio engineering vocabulary, acoustic/psycho-acoustic vocabulary and musical vocabulary... Wise audiophile learn by experiments and studying to distinguish the three distinct perspective... Marketing hide these facts under the rug... They need to sell not to enlighten you.... For example the concept of "timbre" is seen differently from these three perspective...We must learn to distinguish these perspectives...
15 Someone who can do the most can do easily the least...Then if someone cannot optimize a low cost good system so much to make it minimally satisfactory will not be able to optimize the costlier system either... Buying do not replace acoustics knowledge ...
16. When a system reach a MINIMAL sound quality threshold, you forget upgrading because you are lost in music and in ectasy ... This threshold vary for each person and each audio history for sure but EXIST at relatively low cost...
17. Acoustics is the sleeping princess, your ears /brain is the Prince, and the 7 dwarves are the working components...
18. STOP MOVING THE GOAL POST game without end ...This is my 18 th points...These audiophiles moving the goal of each acoustic factors separately to improve them separately, they buy to correct one or the other factor , forgetting the ACOUSTIC WHOLE...They are immersed in some aspect of sound but without the acoustic knowledge to make the whole good to begin with ...
Perfection in small room audio is USELESS and ILLUSORY... It is a market superstition ,Why?
Because our ears/brain are imperfect.... Our small room are generally not perfect too...
Then we must seek synergy between components,ears, and room , not "perfection"...
And synergy must be LEARNED..."Perfection" can be bought if we trust consumers conditioning publicity... i trust my ears not publicity...
