The first, and by far the most important advice I can give is to go out and listen. A lot. To as much as you can. The budget you've got, anything less than stellar blow your mind results ought to be considered total failure. In fact, scratch that. Not just yours. Everyone's. Seriously.
Because quite honestly the results people get depend a whole lot less on budget than time invested listening, auditioning, and learning. There's hardly even any correlation between money spent and results. There's a system right here in Seattle, $1.3M worth of absolute train wreck dreck, stands testament to the futility of throwing money at the problem.
The second most important, which if you really take the first to heart you will discover on your own, but its worth making explicit: you absolutely must budget significant funds for tweaks. Power cords, speaker cables, interconnects, power line conditioner, fuses, room and component treatments like HFT, ECT, and so on. By significant I mean it wouldn't be excessive at all for half the budget to go into these.
Listen, learn, audition. Repeat. Patience is a virtue. The flashy big ticket components everyone already has dangling in front of you, you have no way of knowing now what a total distraction it is. And they are.
There's some general rules. You'll get better results with records than CDs, with tubes than transistors, and with integrateds than separates. You'll get way better results with two speakers and a Swarm than the traditional sub approach. But really its that first rule. Go and listen.
Because quite honestly the results people get depend a whole lot less on budget than time invested listening, auditioning, and learning. There's hardly even any correlation between money spent and results. There's a system right here in Seattle, $1.3M worth of absolute train wreck dreck, stands testament to the futility of throwing money at the problem.
The second most important, which if you really take the first to heart you will discover on your own, but its worth making explicit: you absolutely must budget significant funds for tweaks. Power cords, speaker cables, interconnects, power line conditioner, fuses, room and component treatments like HFT, ECT, and so on. By significant I mean it wouldn't be excessive at all for half the budget to go into these.
Listen, learn, audition. Repeat. Patience is a virtue. The flashy big ticket components everyone already has dangling in front of you, you have no way of knowing now what a total distraction it is. And they are.
There's some general rules. You'll get better results with records than CDs, with tubes than transistors, and with integrateds than separates. You'll get way better results with two speakers and a Swarm than the traditional sub approach. But really its that first rule. Go and listen.