Friends hi-fi system not very good, what do you do or say?


So you're going over to someones home and they give you a tour and they have a hi-fi system in a room. And while visiting of course they turn it on for you not knowing that you have a very nice system in your home and you notice immediately it's just not very good.  But then you're used to the very in you're listening experiences. So what do you do when they ask you what you think?

Do you say sounds really good?

Do you make suggestions?

Do you feel a desperate need to tell them about your system?

Personally, I try not to mention any details about my system. If I'm driving around in a Lamborghini I would prefer to be invisible so I don't get stared at when I get out of my car. If they had a really nice system with interesting components I would probably mention a few of the things I have and then we could bond with our common interests.   Ideally, it would be cool to be in the presence of someone who knew a lot more than I did and a real learning opportunity.

Audio systems tend to be private affairs I guess.  I don't necessarily want to hang out with someone and listen to tunes. Those wonderful College days where it made a lot of sense are long gone.

emergingsoul

Personally, I’d appreciate an honest evaluation of my perhaps quixotic quest in the redux of my diy Walsh by one or more ’experienced ears’ sans pressure and expectations. So far, I’ve had positive responses, but one can still have a reluctance to accept such from ’non-philes’ of unknown experiences....

Nice, normal, ’noia.....*L*

Lacking locals of acquaintance with ’non-adulterated’ listening skills, it’s difficult to properly rate my attempts to do the improbable with the unlikely.... ;)

It’s frustrating, but I trundle on...even if only to amuse self and perhaps y’all can wonder WTH I’m really accomplishing....esp. with non-sota stuff.....

" ’Tis what it is..." How well ’is’ Is?

Some feedback would be nice....

 

 

 

When I listen to other audiophile’s systems I typically think "Sounds good". Not bad but also not "I’ve gotta get out and buy one of those". Not like "It’s so great you just spend 20K on that tonearm and cart". It sounds so much better now.

Ultimately we are limited by the quality of the source. No matter what you do or spend, you can only get so much blood out of a stone. A question is "Do you get better sound from an SACD vs CD than a new set of I/C's, etc?" Of course, if you have no upgrade in source, the only way to get an improvement is more money on components and set-up.

Perhaps hi-end audio is more about the trees than the forest.

 

 

I’ve been giving this an excruciating amount of thought over the past few days, and what I’ve come up with is this:

if I thought I could take him, I’d say, "C’mmon, dude; let’s get it on right here in your pathetic listening room, and after I beat the dog crap out of you then I am systematically going to destroy your miserable gear, piece by sorry-ass piece."

If I didn’t think I could take him in a fair fight, I’d act like nothing was wrong, but when his guard was down I’d head butt him in the bridge of his nose. Since I know he’d be angry and I also know I probably couldn’t take him once he shakes off the initial pain and surprise, I would not stick around. On my way out the door I’d stop and scream at him, "That will teach you to waste my time listening to your sub standard system!" If he had a gravel driveway, I’d be sure to spin my tires as hard as I could to throw rocks at his house.

Just my two cents.

 

Bring your friend to an audio show or maybe a tour of other peoples systems in your area.  Compare from there and discuss what you hear and think about each system. Then go back home and listen to each of your own systems to figure out how they suck, and now both of you will have to get rid of all of it and start over from scratch, LOL. surprise

A well asked question.  I go with just telling people it sounds really good on my system after we find a common performance to talk about, even though that performance is the main thing, except the gear part is the not so personal preference part of playback.  My neighbors prove they are total masturbators compared to the person asking your question, by already telling everyone someone could BEAT my system, same as someone could beat my Corvette if I got that before the Supercar I'm working for, and that's why it can't be me.  Except if someone said that, and then showed them your question, they would get into how anyone could be a good guy, compared to wanting it to be what's next first all the time after that, so they'll all go around saying you just have to be a guy who asks that all the time, so what?  They were all already perverts so that it could be their private parts alone, men and women, and now they only ever want it to be because everything sucks and is boring compared to when their private parts are doing it.  They've all long since gone due to just having to be criminals, so it's past a chance to be going off of any of the biggest selling entertainers, like lots of big eyed women at least still can, after trying going solo first.

Usually, it's just because they think a $50 blue-tooth speaker is already even better than their smart tv screens.  I just tell everyone that until they swap up to feeding a full sized dedicated amp, their sound automatically requires sounding like NO power, even though it retains it's "doing something with it" effect.  But don't expect it to make you HAVE to tap your feet along with your favorites, otherwise you don't even actually care about it, and it's probably because you don't know very much at all about what's really going on, during each track, that you don't at least tap your feet.  Yeah, that's true, don't even try listening to anything else when you own my system set up for reference monitoring at home.  After that, audio forums prove god is on the internet, by proving that even though lots of other people complained since 2005 that my HD600's were unbalanced, and sounded veiled compared to the Grado's, many had the great gear advice I was looking for, and Paul McGowan from PS Audio became the audio setup Guru by answering audiophile's questions on his YouTube channel, and proving that actually nobody even knows anything about setting up a system properly in the first place, let alone what to listen for in better gear, and why some tech types are supposed to be superior to the norm.

Yep, not into listening to tracks with someone else.  This part, I like, though, everyone keep it up, even if you still argue that mp3's are the smart guys already knowing the part people care about the most of all, so that's what proves it's actually the killer ni--ers.

$600 for a 20mb hard drive that operates at a similar speed to 1x CD, when optical storage got discovered to work.  You couldn't fit a whole track on, even if only DOS was on the drive.  Except at that size, and then DOS...  Yeah, early days for PC gaming there, no doubt.  But really, Super-Mario getting coins while he's on mushrooms?  Actually, if he does want to be on mushrooms as an action star, ok, compared to the usual stars.  But Eminem will prove everyone at home is losing to a guy on foot getting chased by a helicopter, even if you're a video gamer 100% until right before and right after that video anyways, so ymmv.  You should all listen to criminal rap primarily, so that you stop being able to care about trying for anything besides it was already you in the first place, anyways, and that's why you don't care about what you play rap on, or even if the biggest $ rapper buys your streaming service, and then charges 2x $$ to make everything, even his own tracks, sound wrong, in an unnatural and irritatingly fatiguing way, since he went along with another guy's plan to make everything else gay also, for buying into his bandwidth-saving fake compression tech.  I was arguing against the mp3's are perfect fans for a long time, until people stopped watching the threads due to already having seen the final output comparison to an original test.  Oh, and since you can't let it be the good guys, you have to make sure it can't be the gear makers, most of all.  killer ni--ers need the tv to sound better than everyone else's, otherwise they won't be the next big thing after proving Watson was the guy we actually need everyone to know is always getting with all the women because of what losers all those AG Bell guys always are, especially regarding their sexuality, for going around being those guys everyone knows never even gets with the women instead because of it, so that's really why it's never them anyways.  Everyone knows I'm the guy who's always with all the women, instead of just watching porn instead the whole time you're listening to all that stuff.  It's your problem you didn't find out who everyone actually thought it was, since the very day you were born, suckers.

See, boring compared to masturbation is everyone else around here.  I have to go to a movie theatre to try to beat big dance-club Marshall's sound somewhere else also.  They argue for flat or in-wall multi-placement creating a soundstage you are on also.  They can also beat anyone by playing a movie copy that's only compressed down from 1.5TB to still 225GB, compared to your second best chance, a 4k disc at 80GB, followed by streaming at `30GB, which happens to have been roughly DVD's original size.  The women in Hollywood aren't for real unless they demand that all compression of their work be determined to be illegal, and the men aren't for real unless they demand at least a 30 foot screen height dimension, hehehe.  Yeah, the movie making industry probably all have the fastest in internet speeds going on, so that the producer can pass around the original copies to each person who needs to add their own work to them.  Hollywood buys the best camera's in the world, and it's their job to be what high-speed GPU's don't have a hope of being able to simulate in Bruce Lee's framerate wet dreams, making sure that Hollywood actors look better than anyone else on screen.  Except they'd actually still prefer it if it were only their studio with that nice new camera, it's just that it's their job to go for that, while they're at it.

Yeah, I need to grow Toronto, or cheat and get us a major Hi-Fi trade show anyways right away myself.  I'm not sure what to go to a local headphone meet for unless someone has a part or complete system that can beat me somewhere.  Except, if it's just one part, that may not work out too well.  Unless someone goes with the new $8k headphone offerings to hear, on anything, but you know who's gear is waiting for the $20k pair to come out, first.  A Hi-Fi trade show is where playback quality competes with live performances, and don't think those attendees haven't been to live performances before.

For better or worse, bad people have to be bad, because they automatically didn't know that the good people couldn't be doing any of that stuff, either.

 

@livinon2wheels Good plan, offering setup advice about what they have, but don't speakers at the wall reflect everything else first?  If we seek electronic instrument playback, they are mic'ed for a headphone amp's presentation.  An acoustic instrument will want to be played back having to assume that they are at that venue, and there are 2 mics covering the whole stage, which people choose 1/3 into the room, as a rule that comes before any room other than that venue's reflectional quirks take over.  But yeah, mic'ing instruments particularly, but also mic'ing any other than a pair of mic's at the front of every stage performance, breaks the rule that was allowing speaker setups to try to replicate at home.  You can't do it, because the mic man will want one next to every cymbal and drum, including the kicks, before he gets his budget done, and then the guitars were made to play straight from the pickups into your amp with a left or right pan or centered angle possible, same as with a voice mic.  Studio recording seems made to swap to home headphone with drivers that trade dynamic impact for higher-speed playback.  Meanwhile, stadiums just load up on Marshall stacks for even that guy in the back row, except wouldn't the fans prefer at some point to trade loudness levels for dynamic impact of the sound, through new extra-impact speaker driver types?  Then, you can really get the part you really can't be getting at home, except people will be allowed to also, except 24hrs,7days/week with those ones even more, until city by-laws have to make a rule about sound pressure without loudness levels, even more.