But, it is so much easier for me to spend $1000 on a cable then to save up the $8000 I will need for a box. They’re always seems to be a hole burning in my pocket.
Why we (often) upgrade the wrong things (first) and ignore the important things
I continue to be impressed by this person. See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jWM0NzE_us&t=50s
He argues for applying a bottleneck principle to audio upgrades: system performance is always capped by its dominant constraint, so upgrading any non-limiting component produces only incremental refinement, not genuine improvement.
The hierarchy of constraints, roughly in descending magnitude, runs: room acoustics and speaker placement (capable of 10–20 dB swings), amplifier headroom and load stability, gain structure alignment, DAC output characteristics, and finally cables. Most audiophile upgrade behavior inverts this hierarchy — people swap DACs and cables because they’re easy, not because they’re limiting.
The gist is a distinction between **audible change** and **ceiling removal**. Any swap can produce a detectable difference; only removing the dominant constraint raises the system’s maximum capability.
He gives a way to test it. When we remove a constraint, that feels unmistakable and immediate — dynamics expand, you stop gear-monitoring and just listen — whereas novelty-driven changes require effortful attention to detect and fade in significance.
Room treatment and gain-structure analysis are effortful; cable swaps are not. Making this worse are the ways we mis-focus on novelty, which amplifies perceived differences. We think we’ve made a structural improvement but we have not, actually.
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Box means speaker? Yes, I get it. And it's cool. His point is for us to throw our money away without the delusion of thinking we're doing something other than throwing it away. I do sometimes wonder how my audio system would sound if I listened knowing that I had just given away several thousands of dollars to someone who needs, say, food or shelter. What an audio experiment that would be! |
@hilde45 I couldn’t agree more. I think the guy that does these videos is the best. He doesn’t say that cables, etc. don’t matter but he gives you a good education of why and when they matter and what it means in terms of your entire system. Best educational videos on Audio gear I’ve seen. He challenges some strongly held beliefs so I’m sure some people reject what he says, but I think he knows his stuff |
@oddiofyl Agree wholeheartedly. There can be major and minor bottlenecks, and the preamp is somewhere in between. @kerrybh I really like him, too. He challenges strongly held beliefs, yes. What I like about his approach is that he’s saying, "If you’re willing to set emotions aside, there is a way to look at the big picture in terms of priorities so that when you make a change, you either attack the problem closest to the root -- or, you recognize that when you make a change (cable, etc.) you don’t overestimate what it might possibly do." I’ve seen so many posts with people debating, say, OCC copper or whatever, and I’d bet real money that half those folks have systems in rooms that are so problematic, acoustically, that they can’t possibly make a large change in their systems AND they are talking past one another in terms of the perceived changes in the gear. To put it bluntly, if people want to have fun acting like chat bots saying words back and forth to one another -- ok, fine. Free country. But let’s not pretend we’re talking about reality, here, right? ;-) |
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