Question: What are some of your best pieces of advise to someone new to the hobby?

Start with inexpensive gear and set it up in a room best fitted for proper acoustics. Then work the room acoustics with all the necessary acoustic treatments until the inexpensive gear sounds best. Only then move up to better gear. If you do it the other way around you will end up wasting a lot of money on gears that will never be fully satisfying. Like building a house, it all starts with a good foundation.

@mmcgill829

1) what sort of music do they prefer ?

2) How "picky’ are their ears?

3) What are their expectations regarding how a system might enhance their enjoyment of said music?

4) Are these expectations realistic, given their room and how much patience, effort, and cash they’re willing to allocate?

Buy a Bose Table Radio and be happy. 

@shermanosity ”…Buy the best speakers you can afford and go from there.”

+1 that is a good one. 

@mmcgill829 - what makes a good cable?

Cables are surrounded by a lot of misinformation - e.g. people talk about resistance, capacitance and Inductance as being key, which is in fact far from the entire story!

Read this thread for some basic knowledge as to ...

• What Makes a good Cable

The two bands that I recommend to people are...

1. Audio Envy - good bang for th buck and good performers
2. Zavfino - the upper end of their line are more articulate and detailed, but at a cost

There are other great brands, but these two will get you a nice sounding system for a reasonble cost.

Cables are perhaps the most important part of any system and spending money on the right cables is money well spent. Choose wisely and they will be with you for life.

But poor cable selsction will cripple the the very best components

e.g.

• I have a mini system the cost me $300 and it will blow away systems cost 10-20 times more, because I used the right cables.
• I sent some of my cables to my nephew for his very modest system and his reply was "now I know what and audiophile system sounds like".

I would start with good speaker cables and then try interconnect cables and lastly Power cables - why?

• the speaker cables allow you hear what improvements a subsequent change in components or interconect or power cables bring to the system
• good interconnects will alow you to hear the changes that upgrades in source components will bring to the system
• Good power cables are the icing on the cake - they allow your components to perform to their very best abilities
  • I aded some great cables to my modetly priced Bluesound Node 2i and it elevated its perofrmance considerably

If you are "handy" you can build some exceptional cables that rival some of the bst TOTL cables from established brands - see this link

• HELIX DIY Cables

I have spent around 17 years developing cables, but only in the last 7 years did I actually discover what makes for a very good cable.

Hope that helps - Steve