What I wish I knew before starting my audiophile journey

OP,

‘Thanks. Great post. While I have been in this pursuit for fifty years and am still learning… a lot. Great advice.

I churned a lot in my first few years as well… not as much as you perhaps… but quite a bit. At first unless you have experience with different components it is hard to know what kind of variation there is on performance of solid state vs tube, mid-fi vs high-fi, speaker types… it goes on and on. You can read all the audiophile magazines you want, but unless you have heard some of the reviewed components you can’t possibly understand how big a difference they are taking about on any parameter.

So, some churning I think needs to happen, but some of the rules of thumb and observations are useful for someone starting off or it is easy to go down a number of blind alleys and just decide the whole thing is just hocum.

@dman1974 cool, thanks for explaining. You did good not losing much money, the only way I can do it is if I lose my credit card :)

Path OP followed is legit path, lots of churn, but with internet marketplaces this is much easier than path I had to follow pre internet.

My pathway was first determining sound quality I was trying to replicate at home, for this I listened to a wide variety of home, dealer and audio show systems, this over many years. I'd pursue systems rather than concentrating on individual components, in other words research individual components I thought would be sympathetic to rest of system. I'd gradually build up systems to a conclusion, at which point I'd sell off virtually all components and start anew when negative conclusions were reached. Negative conclusions fell into one of two categories, excessively analytical or romantic, conclusions were drawn by a slowly dawning truth that only  certain types of recordings were being played over and over. I'd play recordings that sounded poorly and blame the recordings, over time not being able to play a wide variety of recordings was untenable, back to drawing board. Once I got past excesses on both ends, neutrality was adhered to in component purchases, this has been much more pleasant experience. Can be difficult to achieve this, but tweaking and tuning can play large role if one starts with neutral components to begin with. Tuning and tweaking is steep learning curve, but much research and experience helps one get there. Listening is key to both, learn WHO to listen to, comparative reviews from experienced reviewers, context in the sense of knowing the reviewer's  components and their implementation into a whole system will help to determine if the items under review will work in your system. And then we need to learn HOW to listen, WHAT to listen for, experience listening to wide variety of systems helpful here.

Over time if there's  one thing I learned, it was to start off  building systems with sympathetic partnering of amp and speakers, getting this wrong will ensure you'll never get to positive conclusion. This assuming one has AC and room in order, those two are prerequisites.

"No perfect sound can be achieved"

Some of us pursue the most pleasing / most beautiful sound. Imperfection is part of it.