"It's the room, stupid" (apologies to James Carville).
Agree wholeheartedly, but when you look at most virtual systems, convincing people appears to be a fool's errand.
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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Thanks for the well-informed post. When I got into this hobby, a member here took me in. They taught me, via email and zoom, about reflection times, first and distal reflection points, room modes, and all the rest. I measured extensively, moved furniture, and at one point I even had a subwoofer 3 feet in the air to measure vertical modal behavior. He taught me to figure out the bass frequencies first. Then I dealt with the rest – even mapping different reflection times on my ceiling and side walls to try to troubleshoot how to place treatment, and what kind. Now, when I try gear changes, I know that the larger factors have been largely contained. This makes the changes "real." I have no problem with people throwing money at equipment. What bothers me is their assertion that these actions are "justified" in any kind of a scientific sense. They're not justified. They're not disallowed – again, free country. But to assert they're justified is to tarnish the scientific bases for the hobby.
@lhasaguy Good process. I'd even argue that room measurements might come before speaker acquisition. |
This hobby is so subjective and audio upgrades are usually only limited by the size of one's wallet. And of course the size of the space that they have dedicated to their listening room. For those of us who don't have deep pockets, gear chasing becomes impractical. I know because I chased gear for years until one day I realized that my audio system was good enough, and that I needed to simply learn to utilize it to enjoy music; and to stop listening for sounds. I've enjoyed listening to music far more since then. I have a modest system by most standards which I use for near field listening in my den. And because I'm not driving myself to distraction by searching for flaws in my system (or in planning my next upgrade), I'm quite content to just enjoy the music. 😊
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Wholeheartedly agree, having been blessed with a dedicated but wholly wrong room size, a near perfect cube, I invested in a comprehensive suite of acoustical treatments that have tamed multiple acoustical issues with my space. Frankly, it has been the best investment, I have made and has increased the enjoyment of my current equipment immensely, no regrets whatsoever. |
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