For the Hi-Fi enthusiasts among us...

arturo7

IMHO, the quality of speakers is far more important than analog vs digital.

JanV

I have a quite good setup in my living room, but this got me quite excited, my latest addition to the upstairs reading (now becoming) easy listening room.

It’s a full set B&O Beomaster system from 1973 in absolute mint condition and still sounds great.

Not anywhere close to your setups by any standards, but a nice touch of vintage, clean B&O design.

djmusicman

Yes, exactly the speakers are over 90% of the sound. Most amps are designed to be neutral and not color the sound so if they do that correctly they should all sound the same. If it has bass and treble controls you can color it yourself. CD players and DAC’s and 1’s and 0’s so there is no tone difference there unless the manufacturer colored the sound in some way as you could yourself with a graphic equalizer.

Larry S

Hey @Tony C. ... sad / happy news. The owner of Audio Consultants is retiring and shutting down. We loose a valued resource on the North Shore. Fortunately Abt has stepped up their game in a big way but AC was special.

Bill Sohne

Hi guys

totally fantastic .. if off I am not an audiophile !

I just really like this gear ..... my dad was sort of on rye business .... back in the 60/ 70’s was a RCA super tube distributor he rack tube testing machines up and down the east and west coast of the USA then later sold his company to Arrow Electronics ....

But back to listening

here a pic of my living room ..

https://ohmspeaker.com/news/how-big-is-a-big-room/


more later

best
Bill

Wryfox

Oh boy this thread gets my blood pumping. My first love was audio hifi back when my ears were good. Now not so much after decades of competitive shooting.

I started out with my EE degree in the audio industry. worked for several in the first few years then a recession took many of them down, so I ended up in govt service on missile guidance systems...that was a bit of culture change.

Anyway, feeling nostalgic for my first love.

One thing I learned after all these years, buy what sounds good to you and don't let anyone convince you something else sounds better. Let your ears do the judging. Period.

I recall a couple years ago in a high end shop listening to a $40k system...absolutely beautiful looking but not my sound style. Then he turned it off and I walked back out into the entry way and heard very nice music playing and asked what it was..he said oh its just the background system...a bose radio. So I bought a bose radio.

I also have a set of the Bose noise cancelling in ear headphones. Absolutely spectacular.

I honestly feel that headphones may have surpassed speaker systems in audio quality these days, if you don't mind giving up the 'feel' of i

Evitzee

As others have said, but what sounds good to you, don't be overly swayed by the so-called experts.

And at the end of the day it really comes down to the quality of the source material. Unfortunately much music has been mishandled and ruined by poor mixing, mastering and production, often so it sounds ok through cheap ear buds or crappy speakers. The old saying "garbage in, garbage out" really applies to the audio experience. Too many people fell for the digital dream of 'it's just 1's and 0's, you don't need quality equipment, it all sounds the same'.

Engee

I thought I could guess what would be in your record collection from your handle! Nice portrait of the great man there!

bikehomero

As with the watches, I am also a fan of the 60s and 70s with hifi equipment. Sony's old technology is very popular with me.

sxl2004

love the beaten up La Scala and the tube stash’s
🥰

mjb

Power cables, special outlets, filters, etc. it's all a bunch of nonsense, smoke and mirrors, b.s. Any decent amplifier's integrated power supply will be able to handle power fluctuations. IMHO.

Here where I live, we have "dirty" power, according to my HVAC guy, explaining why my A/C keeps burning up resisters. Any fancy cable ain't gonna fix that.

Now, that may be why my CD players keep getting fried, but that's a different topic.

Tony C.

"It’s basically my Dad’s fault" lol!

I'd venture to guess that I am a wee bit older than you, as my interest in audio began in the 1970s. I grew up in Evanston, IL, just north of Chicago, and was lucky enough to have access to a really good, and then rather uncommon Hi-Fi store called Audio Consultants. I loved to hang around and listen to the components, even though it would be a few years before I could afford anything remotely high-end. I learned plenty from the salesmen during that time, and a passion was born.

Some of the notable early components that I once owned were an Apt-Holman pre-amp, Dalquist DQ10 speakers, an early Bryston 4B amp, Magnepan Tympani speakers, Nakamichi 600 cassette deck, Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4000 (vertical tracking) turntable, and the list goes on.

In recent years I developed a fit for purpose system that suited my smaller space in Lisbon, including a vintage, re-capped Accuphase E-303x integrated amp, matching T-103 tuner, Electrocompaniet EMC-1IP CD player, and Harbeth P3ESR speakers.

R rdiiorio

The listening room acoustics will make or break a system no matter what equipment is used.

Archer

Not sure I can agree. That would say that any other component in the system can only have a 10% max impact on the sound, and I’ve heard changes in my own system far greater than that by only upgrading the DAC.

djmusicman

By the time you switch out the DAC’s you’ll have forgotten the sound. Most of the differences people think they perceive are a bias towards the more expensive one. You’d need to plug them both in and have some kind of A/B switch with no pause in-between to test them.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...-shaw-of-harbeth-on-audio-comparisons.327924/

Alan Shaw wrote about this extensively:

The ordinary ear has a completely reliable memory about as long as a goldfish memory: a couple of seconds. Any remembered sonic events separated by a gap greater than a second or two cannot be considered objective. This is because of a conversion process from short to long term memory storage which condenses, simplifies and packages a sensory input into a 'ghost' impression. These impressions are entirely personal to the listener. They rapidly fade and/or take on modifications and restructuring with the passage of time. I would not trust the objectivity of my own audio memory more than a second or two for making business-critical, time separated comparisons. I would not expect others to have significantly better objective audio memory, even if they have a subjective memory of sonic impressions over a lifetime

larryganz

For my speaker rig I'm just using a Pioneer VSXLX 303 AVR to drive AV123 X-Static speakers with a sealed AV123 10" Rocket Onyx sub plus a Polk 12" ported sub in the family room, or a Sony STRDN 1070 AVR to drive PSB Imagine Mini speakers with a Velodyne sealed 8" sub + a Paradigm 10" ported sub.

But my critical listening is with my 2 channel headphone rig - Using a Nuforce CDP or MacBook or NAS to feed music into a PS Audio PerfectWave DAC Mk2 with Bridge II network card > into an Eddie Current ZDT tube amp > into HiFiMan HE-1000se and Sennheiser HD-800s headphones. I also have almost every model of HiFiMan headphones since 2009, and some high-end Grado and modded Denon D7000 headphones, and Audeze LCD-2 v2. I have the Sennheiser HD-60/HEV-70 electrostatic headphone rig as well, which sounds outstanding.

My music is a mic of ripped CD's, hi-res music bought at HDTracks.com, and Tidal hi-res CD and Master quality streaming. My PS Audio DAC supports MQA Tidal decoding as well.

Much of my portable and laptop listening is with a CEtrance HiFi-M8 DAC/amp or BlueDAC feeding into Westone ES60 custom molded in-ear monitors or the JH Audio Roxanne custom in-ear monitors, as well as using a HiFiMan R2R2000 DAC/amp which can use an internal SD card, computer USB, or Bluetooth as the transport.

I was involved in a seminar at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in 2015 where our custom ES60 (via Astell & Kern DAP) could compete with and/or beat $30,000 GamuT speakers, attended by many popular stereo gear reviewers for major magazines and blogs. The JHA Roxanne perform on a similar level, although they are more dependent on an upgraded DAC/amp to be driven properly, vs the Westone ES60 that are more easily driven by anything and scale up as the gear is upgraded.

djmusicman

By the time you switch out the DAC’s you’ll have forgotten the sound. Most of the differences people think they perceive are a bias towards the more expensive one. You’d need to plug them both in and have some kind of A/B switch with no pause in-between to test them.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/thre...-shaw-of-harbeth-on-audio-comparisons.327924/

Alan Shaw wrote about this extensively:

The ordinary ear has a completely reliable memory about as long as a goldfish memory: a couple of seconds. Any remembered sonic events separated by a gap greater than a second or two cannot be considered objective. This is because of a conversion process from short to long term memory storage which condenses, simplifies and packages a sensory input into a 'ghost' impression. These impressions are entirely personal to the listener. They rapidly fade and/or take on modifications and restructuring with the passage of time. I would not trust the objectivity of my own audio memory more than a second or two for making business-critical, time separated comparisons. I would not expect others to have significantly better objective audio memory, even if they have a subjective memory of sonic impressions over a lifetime