Impress Your Friends and Seduce Women!

The more you are an audiophile, the less understood you will be. The general public has been educated that the difference between a cheap stereo and an expensive stereo is how powerful (or loud) it is. If you are still on the power kick then I suspect you are not yet an audiophile (I don't mean you Cwlondon). Many people seem to be utterly perplexed when they find that the large sums I spend on gear are not in the pursuit of being able to play the music louder. It is a huge mindshift for them to listen for how accurately the system is creating the sounds of real instruments and voices, seemingly because they never imagined people would try and do that. The general public has been trained that the pinnacle of audio is to go to a rock concert and the objective is clearly power, not fidelity.

Incredible post Redkiwi! I doubt there will ever be a more powerful statement on our hobby than you have just made. I can add nothing to it.

Redkiwi, please clarify. IMO, fidelity to the music is not possible without the ability to play loudly. I don't mean that the overall level is high decibel, but instead the ability to accurately follow the wide range dynamics of musical instruments is a key element of high fidelity playback. For after all, even in real life, music (acoustic instruments) can be very loud.

i have never had an "uninitiated" 1st-time listener to my system say they could not perceive how it bettered anything and everything they'd previously heard. generally, i let them pick their own music, then play some of my favorites. of course, i don't tell them how much my hardware cost. that's my business, not their's.