A principle guiding the wise audiophile life

To be clear i will repeat this : 

There is no relation between a piece of gear or a system/room before and after his optimal mechanical,electrical and acoustical installation. None.

This does not means that my 150 bucks dac will rival a many thousand bucks dac, nor that my 1000 bucks system will make Mike Lavigne or ghdprentice envious...

Is it clear enough for those who claim to read my mind ?

I hope so.... 

 It does means however that any well optimized system can beat  relatively costlier one IF they are not well optimized...

It does means  that for sure any low cost system even well optimized cannot beat a well optimised costlier system most of the times. because there is a justification for a higher cost price corresponding to a best design most of the times...

Another fact:

 We live an era of luck for audiophile...

We can afford very low cost gear with a minimal satisfaction acoustic threshold. My actual system is very good for his peanuts price ...

All low cost chinese,  save one vintage  from japan, but  2 German vintage headphones...

I had 4 conditioners / purifier/ clean power reserve.  8 homemade  grounding box, 2 Schumann generators, many homemade  Helmholtz resonators in my acoustic corner/room and  one linear power supply serving three gear pieces.

Peanuts costs and very good for what it is ...

I am happy with it, even if better exist, i learned how to install any system at any cost, but i bought vwhat i could afford...i am proud to have been able to learn acoustics concepts...

Acoustics panels are good enough for a living room but acoustics ask for more knowledge than just buying them...Thats my point...

If somebody has never been able to create at low cost a RELATIVELY good system/room , i am pretty sure he will not be able to optimize any costlier system too...

Why ?

 Because the three working dimensions to optimize are the same for any system at any cost...

 For sure there is at some level of price differences...

Using an acoustician to design a room dont compare to my mechanical tuning of a room...I did with what i have, the acoustician architect will create something new...

I hope no one will distort my message ....

a very important observation:

If we divide audio for the sake of my argument in three categories(without specifying a price because it is not my goal to start a useless  arguing here):

----Low-fi or very low cost products,

----Mid-fi

---- High-fi or much costlier design

it is very hard to optimize a low cost system to sound relatively well or good...

it appears, compared to low fi , even unnecessary to optimise mid-fi gear compared to low cost one because it sound way more good sometimes without apparent  need of any optimization...

But, and this is my point, very high end gear need to be optimized as much as low cost gear, mechanically, electrically but especially acoustically to reach his peak working performance .... Ask Mike Lavigne who know a bit about optimization and High -fi gear...

Then some  people with mid-fi laugh at any effort to optimize the gear especially because they purchase mid-fi costlier gear plug and play and the sound can beat in quality even some low cost gear even after his optimization.... ( as an example a magnepan speakers in a living room can beat most low cost speakers even well optimized one...)

This explain why some audiophile can laugh if i spoke about Schumann generators or vibrations controls at low cost...

As i said every system. low-fi,mid-fi,high-fi, need to be optimized...it is just less evident with mid-fi when we upgrade from low-fi....

Ignorance always laugh ( at the expanse of others)...

The wise smile ...

Optimizing means everything matters. And if this not true, tell me what doesn't matter? Some things matter less but they still matter. For instance I don't know how operating systems for streamers became part of this discussion, but for Roon optimization this is important, I run Euphony OS on custom server, using less than 1% on 7 cores of cpu, cpu usage important for sound quality. So here we have another example of how even the seemingly miniscule things do matter.