emergingsoul can watch Jay for hours and days, it’s not his attention span
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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You make some excellent points. However, and this is not a criticism of you, I don’t find the loaded subjective versus objective characterisation at all helpful. It is divisive and inaccurate. A much better way is to consider qualitative and quantitative data. Both of these are equally valid and have their place in audio. There is no scientific reason to privilege one of them over the other. |
@newton_john I believe that @snilf and I were both trying to push the discussion beyond the subjective vs. objective language. Why do you like qualitative vs. quantitative better? I have my reasons but I'd rather hear yours, first. |
Tomato (to-may-toe) - Tomato (to-mah-toe)? Why do you consider the subjective vs. objective characterization to be “loaded”?
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Jay is an exciting showman and doing a remarkable job in Texas. I don't watch all his videos all the way because I don't have a very good attention span and don't really want to commit 25 minutes to watching all these videos about audio systems where they don't really say too much most of the time. The problem is they don't get compensated unless they make the videos really long so they drag things out. It's also helpful if people talking in these videos know what they're talking about and do a good job explaining things. |
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