A principle guiding the wise audiophile life

"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."

Interesting story!

Bare minimum audiophilia for survivalist in hard reality...

It remind me of my actual bliss under the blanket at 13 years old with the first small transistor radio... Music quiet my fears...

I like your last paragraph especially : 

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."

My understanding of the OP's comments is that no matter what you have, you should optimize it. You optimize it individually and you optimize it in relation to everything else in the environment. I believe you should always start with the room because you don't want a speaker that is too big or too small for the room. Once you decide on the speaker, you then need to place it appropriately relative to listening position and you should consider isolating it mechanically. There should be some acoustic treatment and the signal you feed to it should be as pure as possible. You should go through every component in your room and see whether or not you've optimally matched it to other components and that you have optimized it mechanically, electrically, and acoustically. 

It takes about 6 months for speakers to get broken in to sound their best. The room you place your system in is as important as the components you have picked for your system. 

What matters most, is you like the sound of your system.

5 years  ago I purchased an integrated Primaluna, built my own speakers and love the sound of my system. Could it be better? Of course, if I want to nit pick. Perfection is an opinion, not a reality in Audio reproduction. There is a fine line between, "how much better per $1000 will be worth the cost."  For those with deep pockets, well go for it. For me, listening before I purchased maximized the dollars I spent. I had about 100hrs in my speakers before I said, this is what I want. Perfect? For my dollars spent, for me it's darn close. 

@tcutter

​​​​Nice summary. I think you’ve pretty well nailed it in one elegant paragraph.

Personally, the only thing I’d change would be to emphasise the importance of the source more. Although arguably you’ve got that covered by saying the signal should be as pure as possible.