Is spending big bucks a sham. Where have I gone wrong. It's an emotional rollercoaster. Help.
Its not a sham. But it does show just how challenging a task it is to build a truly satisfying system, regardless of price.
Having done this quite a while now I feel there's actually a technical reason why this is so, and if so and you can understand it then you can use it to great advantage.
I've said before the way to build a system is everything matters, so do everything equally. But I get flack for recommending spending equal parts on each component. Like 25% each on source, speakers, amp, and wire. Or what gets even more grief is 20% each on source, speakers, amp, wire and tweaks. Good God the grief I get for that!
But look at your story. Please. Look at it. What you just did proves my point. Because by going dirt cheap then what you did is bring everything down to the level of the crap wire and non-existent tweaks! Because everything is level there is nothing shining out, nothing revealing anything else's flaws in excruciating detail. Just a nice overall balanced presentation.
Money is just the very crude indicator we use as a substitute for performance. Its a crutch. Its not really the cost that matters, its the performance. As long as everything performs at about the same level then your odds of finding magic go way up.
I've proved this more than once. Two of the best most fun systems I ever heard were ones I built for $1200 and $2500. The one for $1200 was set up in my listening room to burn in before delivery. For 2 weeks this little one was so darn captivating I never turned my main system on!
What made these so especially impressive to me was they were both built without auditioning a single component. I simply budgeted out equal amounts for each part, selected from reviews and a few known good components, and put it all together. Boom. Done. The little $1200 was so knock-out good I had a string of people over to hear it.
Now obviously that was one and done. Most audiophiles keep wanting more, adding and upgrading. Naturally in this process there will be times when one thing or another is leading or lagging. But that's the key to the emotional roller coaster. Once you understand what is going on you can either one and done your way off it, or relax and enjoy the ride.