What do your hard-earned dollars go toward?


After finding the "perfect" system within your budget, how do you then tweak it for maximum performance?

1. Mechanical isolation e.g., racks and footers

2. Electrical isolation e.g., power conditioners, power supplies and dedicated lines

3. Acoustic isolation e.g., room treatment

4. My system is just fine out of the box and I would rather spend money on more music

5. Other

 

tcutter
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Speaker Cables

Amp Power Cord

Interconnects

Power Conditioner

Dirct Lines

Rest of system Power Cords

Room Treatments

Mechanical Isolation

In that order in general

Perhaps it is assumed in your questions, but I would start with the positioning of the speakers in the room and how they interact with the room acoustics. I never got all spendy on acoustic treatment- I do use bass traps, but get a lot of mileage out of normal home furnishings including rugs, window treatments and some absorption from furnishings like sofas, pillows, etc.. 

As to accessories, the first thing I’d look at is your electrical power. And by that, I’m not suggesting buying a black box, but having an audit done of the power from your meter through the service panel and breakers to the lines feeding your system. Cleaning up old, corroded or iffy contacts, replacing questionable breakers, making sure your have a good connection to ground, are all things a competent electrician can handle for relatively minimal cost. 

Whole house surge protection (type II) is good but not a complete solution- some use point of use (type III). I use a big Iso transformer to feed my main system which has a surge board in it, and obviates the need for Type III devices.

Mechanical isolation for a turntable is pretty critical and if you have a low mass table, you can probably get away with a wall shelf. I had to go the extra distance, given a high mass table in an old wooden house. 

Wires- no one brand is going to be the "best" for all systems and some folks don’t think power cables, interconnect and speaker cables meaningfully differ. I can hear the differences. The best option(s) in my experience are to listen to the manufacturer/dealer recommendations (you can be skeptical if a dealer is promoting a particular line if only for profit) and to actually try different cables in your system once it is optimally placed within the room. That takes a little time- not fast A/B comparisons but living with the cables over time. This can obviously get complex when mixing and matching. 

I’ve been pretty deliberate in my use of accessories (a/k/a "tweaks") since I’ve found that while some may bring an improvement in one area, they can potentially create downsides in other areas (I experimented with more than 1/2 dozen "footers" on the tube power supply to my phono stage, and found that some gave me more clarity at the expense of increased stridency). So, that’s the last area I’d focus on. It’s a process to optimize a system in a given room and takes time in my estimation. 

Books and music.

This cost me a fortune...

All my life...

Most people dont need books...

Books cost way more than audio if you dont read novels...

 Nowadays a very well optimized low cost system can be very satisfying...

I dont invested money in audio, i experimented in acoustics once  at peanuts...

With success...

Nowadays with free DSP in Foobar or in better hardware  and low cost small  speakers and a well optimized room,minimal audiophile experience cost almost nothing...

Bread and meat cost way more ...cool

And tomorrow you will not speak about audio but about bread and meat...( i spoke for the average dude here)

How many jobs will disappear?

How many wars will be started before  some idiots realized it is useless?

Audio problems today are simple to solve and cost nothing ...

But we need to understand basic acoustics to do so...

What matter is not the brand or so much  the price but acoustics and the electrical grid...