High End System Building. How important is the matching, cabling and room? Thoughts ?


The last 20 years as an audiophile and now a dealer has taught me a very important lesson. Everything matters. The equipment can be great but no matter how much you spend the matching is very important. The cabling is also important. Some think cabling is all about making it sound better. I prefer my cabling to not get in the way. It’s like it can’t be a clogged faucet for your sound.  Materials and shielding are very important. In addition to that the room is very important. You may not have a perfect room but you build your system to work in the room you have. I don’t have all the answers but you can’t just spend money and have a great system. Combination of equipment, cabling and room has gotten me there. I’ve tried a lot of gear and cables and this is how I feel. What are your thoughts everyone? 

calvinj

Acoustic truth does care about not introducing noise into the environment you wish to place treatments and embeddings. I am referring to signal noise that smears, perverts, and masks the audio signal. So the gear and tweaks audiophiles buy certainly play a role at reducing signal noise. Gear, modifications, tweaks, room treatments, vibration control, component matching, speaker placement, room construction, listening skills, subjective preferences and so much more all play a role in this passion. They all matter. How one comes to realize sonic contentment is a complex meshing of all of this. No one road is the universal way.

@mahgister I have looked at your virtual system many, many times and what you have done is so remarkable and interesting.  Your perspective is valuable and yet another important piece of the puzzle. 

My system is average ... THe tweaking is not ...

 i was frustrated and with no money ... I am no more frustrated ...

You are very kind and patient with me ... Thanks ...

Happy near year ...

@mahgister I have looked at your virtual system many, many times and what you have done is so remarkable and interesting.  Your perspective is valuable and yet another important piece of the puzzle. 

@grannyring the story of how Hans Looman the owner of our company he and I met before at a show and the system he brought before he started his company was from manufacturers I knew that had worked together before. So when it didn’t sound right I was like I heard that system before. I knew it had synergy. I had a bag of cables I traveled with. THE CABLES WENT IN AND POW! The whole system changed! It opened up. The music. The air. The decay. Immaculate.  That’s how we started on this journey 6 years ago! He took it upon himself to build equipment and cables so that the cables would never be a bottleneck again!

@grannyring @mahgister i don’t minimize what @mahgister has said or done. You can get the most out of what you have that way. But the build quality and technology in the right higher end equipment is just on another level. All things being equal. Synergy wise. I had some pretty good classe stuff early on 15 years ago but I hear the veloce Ls1 which was a battery powered expensive tube pre amp. At that moment I realized there are levels in this audio game. The difference was jaw dropping. The equipment was just next level. Soundstage transparency and detail. 0 noise floor. Wowwww!

OP,

I completely agree with your opening statement.

 

I fortunately accidentally bought a house with an exceptionally great audio space. I carefully populated it with the highest quality synergistic components with transparent (Transparent) wires that I could afford, and spent as much time as I could afford tweaking the system and the venue and have a great sounding system.

You work within the constraints. I have heard fantastic systems in rooms the size of walk in closets where careful choice of components and treatments produced incredible sound, ridiculously expensive systems carefully set up and less expensive, meticulously assembled systems.

You use what you have in the way you said.