Are You A Disciplined Audiophile?

I consider myself a disciplined audiophile as well.

I refrain wasting money on expensive tp, caviar, cars, ostentatious homes so I can make a greater investment in audio. I read multiple publications, listen to lots of live acoustic music and instruments to train my hearing. I do careful long term comparisons of equipment and configurations to achieve the best sound possible.

It is why we can all  trust reading your posts your advice about necessary or very useful gear upgrades ...

😊

I consider myself a disciplined audiophile as well.

I refrain wasting money on expensive tp, caviar, cars, ostentatious homes so I can make a greater investment in audio. I read multiple publications, listen to lots of live acoustic music and instruments to train my hearing. I do careful long term comparisons of equipment and configurations to achieve the best sound possible.

I have enough of a scientific background to know that you need to change just one variable at a time to avoid confusing results, so I adhere to that sort of scientific discipline.

From my experience, I would say that generally I have heard improvements immediately from changing some components, but that there can be additional improvement over time. One instance that has surprised me was having my Apogee Duetta II (with ribbon midrange-tweeters) speakers refurbished. The man who did the work said there would be a break-in period of a few hundred hours. But I found they improved after about a year of regular use--there was some brightness that gradually diminished, and I could test this with one particular piano note on one particular recording, as well as massed violins in some orchestral recordings. So, that’s another way in which I’m disciplined--like many audiophiles I rely on certain familiar recordings for testing components.

My buddy and I (who is also a forum member) had a DAC shoot-out with three DACs. Forgetting brands, all three were only about 2 weeks old.

It was crystal clear which the better of the three was.  So, I'm still not sure where discipline comes into that. 

I will say that in my experience having the entire system "warmed" up is a good thing.  This could be easily my perception, as in relaxed focused on music and  not on the sht storm that is "normal life". 

Regards,

barts

Disciplined audiophile, that's an interesting idea. I won't wait if the sound is markedly unpleasant. Maybe a few days at most. If it's really nice it's easy to let it go for a few months - if my love affair with the new sound lasts that long. Or, so long as some new idea doesn't intrigue me enough to want to try it. I've messed up a lot of what I thought were great sounding setups only because I got an idea in my head and was curious to try it. 

For whatever reason I have a thirst not just to achieve good sound, but to better understand what it is that makes me think it's good. Just last night and this morning I decided to have a new look at my midrange horn, which has been difficult to interpret since it's measured response varies so much with measuring distance and angle. It's a weird beast and I don't know what's right. I tried a method I learned of yesterday called "beamforming" for measuring. You basically add the measurements together that are taken at various distances. This has the effect of suppressing the effect of early reflections, so the direct response of the horn can be more clearly seen, and adjusted as needed with crossover settings and equalization. The end result seemed to give good overall room response, but boy did that do something weird. The bass seems hard to hear, vocals seems very clear and natural but much louder than the bass, even though the bass measures as loud as ever. Before I did this experiment the system was sounding great. 

So no, I'm not disciplined. I didn't even bother to save the settings I had earlier when it sounded great because I was too eager to try new things.