Interesting situation! Do we need this....
I had a very interesting and unsettling experience that brings this hobby all together...or rips it apart. Recently, I bought a pair of Fluence SX6 speakers, on sale at Amazon for $120 pair. A small, black, two way bookshelf speaker. Highly-positively reviewed. My plan was to pull the drivers to use in another project. I couldn't buy drivers and crossovers like this for $120(More on this later)...Anyways, I was listening to my new kit amplifier, AKITIKA Z4 that I recently built...Streaming Quobuz...The Fluance speakers were set up next to the KEF LS50 Metas as I had used them previously to test yet another kit amplifier, Nelson Pass' ACA Mini.....For six hours I was simply amazed at how great the AKITIKA kit amp sounded. Massive sound stage, tight, well defined bass, some of the best vocals I've heard, the "AIR" around jazz instruments was fantastic!.....a system to behold...playing through my KEF LS50 Metas....Six hours later, after all types of music, it was time to call it a night (or early morning)....As I go to shut down the system, I realize that all night I was listening to the Fluance speakers!!! They were placed side by side with the KEFs. Do we really need any of this high end equipment to really enjoy the music!
I’ll bring up another point that’s similar to me - perfect blacks on OLED TVs.
Unless everything else is "perfect" too, tis just another example of chasing the wrong thing. Perhaps the real problem is in our genes? We men especially have evolved over countless millennia as hunters. Looking around it's not too hard to see aspects of this in much of present day male behaviours. |
@rbertalotto - Is the question how good speakers need to be to be enjoyed or how good the audiophile expects them to be? I think your experience is partly a result of expectation bias because you expected that the new amplifier would be an improvement with the more expensive speakers. This is human nature and what makes me trust results that are counterintuitive the most. I have found more than once that I’ll make a change and then convince myself that the original setup sound difference in some way, but when I swap back it’s far more similar (maybe close to indistinguishable) from the new setup. My most recent change was to try a new set of speaker cables. In this case it was an actual relief when I switched back. In this case my listening muscle memory didn’t deceive me. |
After 50 years in the HiFi business, and auditioning hundreds of amplifiers and speakers, I'm WAY beyond improved expectation bias. In fact, most times just the opposite..."Here we go again with yet another Worlds Greatest amplifier/speaker/preamplifier..." Mostly underwhelmed or simply what I expected. |
