Five "Golden Rules" of HiFi?

There are no rules. But a good guideline is to have a clear goal in mind.

1. Trust only your own ears; ignore what other people say, and what scientific claims and/or reasoning is used. Mostly other people only mean well, but the only person having your ears is you. We all experience things differently, and we like different things as well. Besides, what does it matter if science can prove that a certain product is great, if I don't like it? Happens to me all the time.

2. Realize that there is no "best" component and there never will be, much the same as there are no "neutral" components. Might as well strike those two words from your hifi vocabulary!

3. Look at the entire system as an integrated whole, including cables, equipment support, power conditioning, room treatments and so on, and don't get caught up chasing isolated components. Hardware is indeed important, but peripherals even more so. Synergy is everything, and one piece of equipment is only as good as it is in your home, in your particular setup.

4. Make sure you listen to the music you like. There's no point in demoing gear with "hifi records" - most gear sounds fine with these. The real challenge is, will it play your favorite records, and will it play them to your liking? Most high end gear won't like less-than-perfect recordings, but they do exist!

5. Ignore all scientific babble and simply listen. And listen to the music, not the equipment.

1. Experiment at your leisure - try new things and enjoy them while you do.

2. For quite a while, you can look for moments of epiphany - times when you try something and it is just clearly significantly better than before. That's when you should spend your money. If you're having to strain, or listen for days to decide, you should move on.

3. As you system gets better, improvement will be more subtle, but it will still be very clear to you that it's an improvement. Don't "upgrade" because it should be better, upgrade because it is clearly better.

4. Be very clear in your mind that this is a hobby. Like other hobbies that we get avid about, it's too easy to get too serious. Keep it fun.

5. When reading any magazines or online forums, keep all of the above in mind, and don't read if you can't. In their best form, they will educate and inspire experimentation and open-mindedness. In their worst form, they will inspire dissatisfaction and envy.

1)strive for tonal neutrality - use careful synergy to obtain it
2) see live acoustic music to know what instrumentation is meant to sound like
3) research thouroughly, buy used or from a direct manufacturer (Teres/Galibier/Salk/Sora Sounds (ZYX)/AVS are examples) Large companies have huge marketing and middleman charges
4)tame your room first
5)invest in good cables, power supply and isolation
6) loose yourself in the music not the equipment

No - I could probably afford a condo in SF if I wanted to... but, I have this thing about the Chinese supporting American banks with funny money, and housing bubbles popping. Not to mention all the internet tech people who paid with confederate money IPO notes, and are currently going into foreclosure making banks harder and harder to deal with for everyone. Not everyone on 'Gon can though buy a house thoug, or live somewhere like Manhattan and I don't think any audophile company's attitude should be "Screw them". And there are many, many great solutions for apartment dwellers, not the least of which is a thousand dollar pair of headphones and a headamp in the $1000-2000 range, which will, I guarantee, kick the crap out of every $100,000 system on 'Gon. Seriously, you don't like headphones? It was really just sort of a joke - but you know, pro guys wear them for a reason, and they are single unit diaphragm, and the expensive ones go down low and up real high, so they have no crossover problems, and no phase or time coherency problems. With some single ended tube equipment they will knock your socks off even if you're jaded like you or me. It's real, real hard not to like them. It's real real hard to like even a good pair of electrostatics by comparison which come the closest. I was talking as much about space as money.