Have I Hit The Point Of Diminishing Returns?

From your responses, I gather that a goodly number of you are unable to grasp the concept of diminishing returns. I know that this failing is not due to lack of information because the essence has been explained in this very thread.

The Law of Diminishing Returns does not state that no further improvement can be attained. It says that beyond a given point in your refinement trajectory you will pass a point beyond which further improvements come at an ever increasing cost ... that the reward will not be commensurate with the outlay. It has nothing to do with your audiophile justifications or your arbitrarily assigned philosophical contrivances. In fact, it may have nothing to do with many of you at all. In a nutshell: your "bang for the buck" is headed for the red. However, the person who started the thread wants to know if he has passed that point and I say he has. I am not saying that he should or should not continue his pursuit from a hobbyist standpoint but I will continue to assert that, from a purely economic perspective, he like the rest of us has stepped off the deep end and is drifting ever further from shore.

I agree with you Macrojack, I feel that diminshing returns hit very hard and very early in this hobby, earlier than most here would agree with.

That said, there is one flaw with your logic, the sentence "that reward will not be commensurate with the outlay". The main problem is that while the outlay can be measured, the reward cannot be measured. So while some may say they spent 50% more money and improved their sound by 100%, others may say they spent 100% more money and improved their sound by only 5%. The money can be measured, the satisfaction gained from money spent cannot be measured, so diminshing returns will mean different things to different people.

I've stated my case. My current $30K system sounds about 90% as good as my $125K system was. So that is my reasoning behind believing that diminshing returns hit hard and early. I'm sure that a nice $5K system could give my rig a run for it's money.

However, back when I was assembling that $125K system, I swore that each little upgrade was adding another 2%, 5%, 10% improvement to the sound. It was only after tearing the system down and rebuilding a much less expensive system that I realized that all of those dozens and dozens of 5% improvements could not have really existed if a $30K system was 90% as good as a $125K system.

Point being, since the return (musical satisfaction) cannot be quantified, whether it is diminishing or not cannot be measured.

Macrojack, from my perspective you are the one who seems not to be able to get it. The law of diminishing returns is simple; we get it.

What you don't seem to see is that you have set the point of diminishing returns painfully low, and others disagree, and you have no way to demonstrate that we are wrong. Your opinion on where the law of diminishing returns kicks in is not absolute; somehow you seem to think it is. It is nothing other than your opinion, "...beyond a given point in your refinement trajectory you will pass a point beyond which further improvements come at an ever increasing cost ... that the reward will not be commensurate with the outlay." I have been trying to tell you that you are declaring what cannot be proven.

Jmcgrogan2 gets it, as he points out the same thing, that you are appealing to an absolute which does not exist.

Jmcgrogan2, I find your logic strained. Now that you left the $125K rig you state that the incremental gains didn't exist because you built a rig that's 90% as good? I would suggest you were doing things wrong then, when it came to your high priced rig, because at that point - at any point - one should not settle for a 2%, 5% or even 10% gain/improvement, but more like a perceptual 25% or 50% improvement. It is not worth a lot of money, if I were to state what I consider diminishing returns from a perspective of performance, to gain only a perceived 2% or 5% improvement, so if you were spending big dollars and content with that, I suggest you were vastly overspending to improve your rig. As a consequence, I can see why you think diminishing returns sets in quickly. However, I think it had more to do with your methodology of system building than anything else.

Simply building a lower cost rig that beat the prior higher priced one assembled does not demonstrate that generally lower cost rigs come oh, so close to higher priced ones. If you now nullify your previous impressions/conclusions about the $125K rig you had, distrusting them, how are we supposed to put confidence in your declaration that the lower end rig is so much better? Maybe if you went back to a $125K rig you would change your mind again!

But, you are correct in concluding, "since the return (musical satisfaction) cannot be quantified, whether it is diminishing or not cannot be measured."

I understand the definition of Diminishing Returns. My main point is if you can't measure reward, diminishing returns is up to the person writing the checks to decide.

Macrojack, perhaps you should quit while behind and stop further embarrassing yourself. The world doesn't revolve around you and you don't get to dictate what's ABSOLUTE.

Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole is not going to work. There's NO best in audio!