What audio system do you have, or plan on getting?

[Fëanor]

There is not possibly anything I want to learn from the likes of you or others about HiRes equipment. Period. Create your own thread, and you will see I will not participate to nuke the pleasure of others.
This thread was not meant for the likes of you and others, it was meant for sharing a enthusiasm for audio gear, not for people that think that all this is snake oil. I will not comment further, all is said.

Harry, there is an audiophile site you might enjoy where intelligent & rational people discuss high-end equipment without too much noise from objectivists.

If you haven't discovered it already, that site is 'AudioShark'.  The name of the site might not be  engaging but the equipment discussions there might be very much to your taste.

[StudioGuy]

I've always had the advantage of very limited funds to indulge my audiophile interest. That is, I had to seek high VALUE in financial terms from the components I purchased.  Consequently, I believe, I was more open than many audiophiles to objective testing & measurement. Note that contemporary testing, e.g. at Audio Scient Review, is more comprehensive than was it back in the day of Julian Hirsch, (no disrespect to that gentleman).

Yes, the history of the audiophile world is an interesting object lesson in human/consumer psychology. Back in the 1960's and '70s the audiophile world was generally far more "scientific", actual audio and psychoacoustic scientists and engineers routinely interacted with the audiophile community. There was still quite an amount of snake oil by the mid '70s, particularly with amps, but the community generally valued objective measurements and the facts/science more than it does now. A big turning point was the Carver Challenge in the mid 1980's, which along with the increasing amount of measurements and blind tests indicating no audible difference (largely due to the far higher accuracy of digital audio), caused quite a stir in the audiophile community and resulted in many audiophiles realising just how much they were being scammed and losing trust in the publications reviewing audiophile equipment. This posed an existential threat to many audiophile manufacturers and audiophile publications and reviewers, many of whom then commenced a campaign of misinformation to falsely discredit measurements, blind testing and those who would refute that misinformation (scientists, engineers and educated audiophiles). Eventually leading to the false dichotomy of objectivist vs subjectivist and that exact same misinformation still being routinely regurgitated  more than 35 years after it was published (and debunked).

With regards to the testing. Back in Hirsch's day, it was far more difficult to run a battery of tests and far more difficult to do so with precision. Everything was manual and analogue, each test required a carefully manually calibrated test signal and it's own test equipment, and when you did get a precise measurement it was difficult or impossible to output it in a publishable form, you literally needed a lab full of test equipment and a great deal of expertise to get precise measurements from it. Fast forward a few decades and you can get yourself an AP555 plug in say a DAC, select a battery of tests from the software interface, select start and the AP unit chugs through them all automatically and outputs a folder full of perfectly formatted, incredibly precise charts/graphs ready for publication. This is a bit of an oversimplification, you still need to know what you're doing to select the correct settings and need a bit of extra gear but not the lab full of gear and level of expertise required previously.

In the recent 15 years or so I discovered that well-measuring but relatively cheap components often sound better than very expensive equipment. That is, especially when it comes to detail, transparency, crisp dynamics, and articulate bass.

That's been the case for half a century. The first edition of the Audio Critic (1977) states "Price is no longer a meaningful indication of quality; it has become a marketing gimmick".

The Lexicon BD-30 placed the Oppo BDP-83 electronics in a fancy case and cost seven times as much.

That's also an old trick. Back in the early/mid 1990's it became impossible to tell the different DAC chips apart in blind tests, so basically the audiophile industry just used the same components as everyone else and put them in expensively milled cases. That only worked for so long though, come the mass internet age and eventually YouTube, it became too easy to open up the case, see effectively the same components and disseminate that information.

So a new marketing trick had to be devised; stick in a silly looking transformer/power supply and revert to a less accurate, more expensive, superseded technology (R2R and NOS designs) but market it as "better", "more musical", "more refined", "more analog" and a host of other nonsense claims. They did look different though, if you open the case, they look more like the DAC sections of CD players back in the early days of digital audio that no one uses anymore. A bit like opening a car bonnet and seeing a bunch of gold plated Weber downdraft carburettors and thinking it looks different, more expensive and performs better than modern fuel injected turbo engines.

[Harry]

Harry, there is an audiophile site you might enjoy where intelligent & rational people discuss high-end equipment without too much noise from objectivists.

If you haven't discovered it already, that site is 'AudioShark'.  The name of the site might not be  engaging but the equipment discussions there might be very much to your taste.

Thank you, I will go there and forget about this thread altogether, where no one is waiting for what I have in my listening room and beyond.

[71 dB]

Thank you, I will go there and forget about this thread altogether, where no one is waiting for what I have in my listening room and beyond.

Why suffer here, if you can feel more at home elsewhere?

[Kalevala]

Thank you, I will go there and forget about this thread altogether, where no one is waiting for what I have in my listening room and beyond.

Hi Harry,

Just enjoy what you have (and/or upgrades).  In the end, it's all about the music and what makes you happy.

K