Gregm, I have three words for you, which will forever and a day relegate me to the level of the great unwashed tin-eared mid-fi legions: "double blind testing". I'm sorry, I am a sceptic. My point is that the power of suggestion is such that we, as humans, are apt to believe that something, anything in fact, that is very expensive has to be better. We may quibble and say that brand x is better than brand y, notwithstanding the fact that brand x is costlier, so long as brand y is also so expensive as to make it attainable only to a few. My question to you, in closing, is the following: do you actually know what goes into making those recordings? Put another way, do you honestly think that you can get mo' better music coming out of your lp or cd than is actually put there in the first place by the process of amplifying the signal? Isn't the whole notion of high end audio, at the listening end of the chain predicated on the belief that the recording process is so far ahead of what we have to play the recording with that we can still wring out improvements by heroic means on the listening end? I know, for some, everything in the chain is a signal processor, has a sound signature, from caps, to copper, to cables, to the chassis in which all of this stuff is put. If every minute detail was perceptible and as important as strato-high-end audiophiles say and want them to be, we are indeed the zenith of God's creatures. It has gotten to a level where some audiophiles can actually hear the sound of sub-atomic particles. Give me a break! I am, and shall remain, a sceptic. There is a difference between a good system and a not so good system. The rest is the trivial pursuit of keeping up with the Jones' of this audiophile world and the daily feeding of neurotic anxieties. More emphasis should be placed on listening to the music, understanding it in a technical, musicological and aesthetic way. Luckily, people are free to choose how they want to use their time and what they want to believe in. I simply have no time to spend on being duped. Making of minute differences in sound, that are barely, if that, perceptible is, to my mind at least, trivial. If you have to strain to hear a difference (a.k.a "improvement") when a component is changed in a good quality system, it probably just isn't there. The small, tiny, incremental improvements can add up to something of significance, I agree, but again, on close inspection, you realise that the sum of all of these is not the revolution that the audio press and ad people for high end manufacturers announce every month.
