Comments please on: NAD M23 vs c298 vs. other newer Class D

"@hilde45 if I can find a local Denver person who owns these and maybe we can have a listening session". 

And, then of course the most ideal situation would be to bring them to your house, with your source, your preamp(s), with your speakers, in your preferred listening room.   

I pretty much came to a conclusion a few years back that listening to familiar components at shows and other people's houses will result in too many other uncontrolled variables. It can actually create more confusion than benefit imo.   

And, then of course the most ideal situation would be to bring them to your house, with your source, your preamp(s), with your speakers, in your preferred listening room.   

@decooney I’m at the point where if I cannot listen to a more expensive piece of gear in my room (which is extensively treated, balanced, measured and assessed with my own ears), then I’m not going to buy it. I have heard any number of pieces of gear in really crappy stores and also in other people’s homes where I thought, "I have no idea what this would sound like in my space or in a decently treated space."

It’s a weird kind of situation, in the sense that it’s like pseudo-science. People pretend to be listening to the gear, making observations and judgments, but there’s so much in play that is not acknowledged that the comments made are more like Kabuki theater than actual science. Audio store owners love to engage us with patter about this or that aspect of the sound – and I know this is their job – but what bugs me is that it is pretend empiricism, not actual empiricism.

Conversations on fora like Audiogon go on and on about the sound of gear, but the room is half the equation, so a lot of these conversations are basically people just expressing what they hear or like. Is there anything "wrong" with that? Well, no, unless it’s being stated as if it were fact. And that’s what a lot of people do – they express it as if it were fact to add emphasis. But without some responsible reportage about the room's acoustics, this is just rhetoric. For a cheap piece of gear, sure, I’ll try it and see. But if we’re talking thousands of dollars, well, I’m not interested in gambling. There needs to be a fuller accounting of all the key acoustic factors in play, including the room.

Where do we listen to our systems, right?

LIVING ROOM GUY HERE:

I’m nowhere near where members are here with dedicated and treated rooms. By choice I keep my main system where we are the majority of the time, and there is dedicated listening time and what I call "walk-around-listening time" too while we are doing other things and yet letting the system play for 4-8 hour stretches on weekends, etc. Like it was growing up in the 70s for me, part of the enjoyment.

All of my listening and testing goes on in my main family room, with various items to the sides, furniture we sit in out front, as any normal family room has.  

My final main speakers were designed, built, tested, and tweaked using this family room as my final test bed. Unless I go and listen to gear in a room similar to mine and with my sources and such, its really a nice thing to go look at  to get a "general idea", but I KNOW 100% I won’t know what its actually going to sound like until I get it home, broken in, and warmed up over a few weeks time - at least. For sure.

+1

My final main speakers were designed, built, tested, and tweaked using this family room as my final test bed.

That’s a key point. You *built* your speakers for that room. That’s a kind of "treatment" in my opinion, though I am not sure how you built it for the room other than back and forth trial and error. That's a good method but it helps to also have information about nodes, reflections, etc. by measuring. But if you haven’t measured and it sounds good to you, that’s important. Could it sound better? Quite likely, but if that can't happen, well it's best to find a practical life-balance. It's not "audiophile-ideal" but it is "life-ideal."

For me, getting into the audiophile hobby has meant playing around with tubes, gear, cables, isolation platforms to see what changes they make. But I get extra confidence in playing around with those minor changes knowing that the largest factor, the room, is dialed in. I’d compare it to tasting different wines -- I prefer to judge the differences between a merlot and a cabernet without having a strong breath mint in my mouth at the same time. I can tell some differences between the wines with a breath mint in my mouth, but I would prefer not to make distinctions with additional distractors in the comparison.