A principle guiding the wise audiophile life

a very important observation:

If we divide audio for the sake of my argument in three categories(without specifying a price because it is not my goal to start a useless  arguing here):

----Low-fi or very low cost products,

----Mid-fi

---- High-fi or much costlier design

it is very hard to optimize a low cost system to sound relatively well or good...

it appears, compared to low fi , even unnecessary to optimise mid-fi gear compared to low cost one because it sound way more good sometimes without apparent  need of any optimization...

But, and this is my point, very high end gear need to be optimized as much as low cost gear, mechanically, electrically but especially acoustically to reach his peak working performance .... Ask Mike Lavigne who know a bit about optimization and High -fi gear...

Then some  people with mid-fi laugh at any effort to optimize the gear especially because they purchase mid-fi costlier gear plug and play and the sound can beat in quality even some low cost gear even after his optimization.... ( as an example a magnepan speakers in a living room can beat most low cost speakers even well optimized one...)

This explain why some audiophile can laugh if i spoke about Schumann generators or vibrations controls at low cost...

As i said every system. low-fi,mid-fi,high-fi, need to be optimized...it is just less evident with mid-fi when we upgrade from low-fi....

Ignorance always laugh ( at the expanse of others)...

The wise smile ...

Optimizing means everything matters. And if this not true, tell me what doesn't matter? Some things matter less but they still matter. For instance I don't know how operating systems for streamers became part of this discussion, but for Roon optimization this is important, I run Euphony OS on custom server, using less than 1% on 7 cores of cpu, cpu usage important for sound quality. So here we have another example of how even the seemingly miniscule things do matter.

@sns 

I did try JPlay on an iPad with dBpoweramp Asset as an alternative to Roon. I thought it sounded slightly better. It's claimed to do so because there's less traffic on the network. It's cheaper, too.

Unfortunately, I couldn't use it because it didn't play gapless with my Linn DSM. I am hoping that one day Linn will make the DSM compatible with JPlay.

Don’t try try to establish your own priorities when approaching music reproduction at home for others..  Convenience, form factor, physical contraints, budget, flexibility, complexity, esthetics, leveraging their investment, space planning for the room, etc. are ALL valid considerations for "non-audiophiles."  Getting the lower midrange "right" may be #42 on their list of what’s important. 

Example:  I, literally, cannot give away "good examples" of vintage audio gear to my grandkids that I’ve set aside in safe keeping or them for decades.

"So the five o'clock shadow and Adam's Apple didn't give it away?

Not that hard to tell the difference between a rooster and a cat."

This was the early 70's, and we were about 18 years old. No one was much thinking about Adam's Apples back in those days.

These depicted below were my first dorm room speakers:

Zenith "Circle of Sound" Speakers

My mother bought these for me probably because her father was always going on about the high quality of Zenith TV sets. Simpler times all around.

My dominant recollections of those days were ones of befuddlement and anxiety. Every night in my dorm bed I would listen to a vinyl recording of "nature sounds" from somewhere in the countryside - crickets and a faint sound of a dog barking at the next farm over sort of thing in a vain attempt to fall asleep. I used to hang on to my dinky little system for dear life, but without the slightest notion of "audiophile." It was all about psychological survival by whatever means were at hand.

Then I made a college friend who opened the door for me. This guy had a fairly advanced reel-to-reel sound system. He said "Here, smoke this," and then he told me to lie down and put some Koss headphones on me and fired up Cat Stevens' "Tea For the Tillerman" album.

"Ok," I said to myself after floating back down to Earth. "Now I see."