I have always spent more on my preamp than other components because the wrong one can be a bottleneck that sets off a spiral of " upgrades"
Sad thing is those upgrades aren't being exploited to their full potential with a mediocre preamp in the loop
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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@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? ;-) |
I like him very much, as well. He is a breath of fresh air. For one thing, he refuses to frame issues in either/or polarities, such as "measurement vs. listening". The fact that he acknowledges and covers both the objective and subjective aspects of topics he discusses elicits my respect and appreciation. He certainly seems very knowledgeable from an engineering standpoint but manages to avoid burying the viewer in jargon. Is he perhaps a university professor? The clarity of his presentations suggests teaching expertise. On another point, some of us focus on changing gear and cables because we don’t have the leeway to change our rooms. The fact that this approach has less potential for significant improvement compared to treating the room does not discourage me from experimenting to see what can possibly be gained. |
I liked that he addresses this point. He's basically saying, "It's critical to first identify and estimate the magnitude of your constraints. If you don't, you can experiment but you'll have no idea if there's a chance you can make a gain. Some may be able to, but others won't, and they'll chase gear forever. Needle in a haystack."
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