The YouTube link is very meticulous, if I will follow the guy opinion? I will never finished. In audio there is always bottleneck , why I don’t base my upgrade to weakest link or bottleneck. I take this hobby or upgrading like a journey with joy, When you have good level listening skills ,and knowledge you have the understanding just to enjoy the final destination.Angela Gilbert Yeung is right it’s hard to improved a very good system. Is not worth the money you spend.He said better to put up a second system to do what your other system can’t do. Example I prefer listening to my KLH model9 speakers when I will play classical and my Borensen x1 for jazz , vocal.
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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With no snark intended, looking at many system pages of members, writing in with this or that problem, tells one that room acoustics/treatments are non existent. Often this is one hundred percent due to co-habitation, the exiting space, cards dealt, budget, thinking the speakers will overpower the space's reflections or just not "getting it". Often advertisements will show speakers in a heavily glazed room with stone floors. |
@hilde45 +1 on the videos. If someone finds them too long, don't watch. Just my opinion, but I think these videos are the most instructive I've seen on YouTube for those who want to develop a deeper understanding of how and why systems behave as they do, particularly for those of us who don't have an EE background. Putting them together in a logical order and watching them in sequence would be very useful making more educated consumers. Which is not to say that his opinions are the last word, but its a great primer on basic principles. If you are more into bombastic entertainment, this is not your guy-that's Jay, and I enjoy a lot of Jay's work as well. |
@hilde45 I appreciate your thoughtful comments. We are dancing on a conceptual pinhead-saying close to the same things in different ways. There may be reasons why we have different subjective tastes, but that doesn't mean our tastes are less different or that my preference is right and yours as wrong. I'm sure there is some difference in brain chemistry that explains why I know that butter pecan ice cream is best while many mistakenly prefer chocolate. Or that some misguided folks prefer opera to blues. I tend to believe that people generally form an impression of the sound from equipment, good or bad, pretty quickly. For whatever reasons-and you make good points about what those might be-a certain sound signature will be pleasing to some but not others. I think the impression is often based on sound but also influenced by other factors-appearance of the gear, mood, expectation bias, preconceived brand opinions, etc. We then often backfit our impressions by wrapping them in fancy, poorly defined audiophile jargon, but that doesn't change the fact that we like what we like. I agree that we can have productive discussions concerning the nuance of our subjective preferences, but often don't because a lot of audiophiles seem to think that their preference is a universal truth-not just a personal preference. How many times have you seen posts saying "I hear it this way and if you don't something is wrong with your ears or your system." Or heard from folks who believe if someone spends more for gear than they judge necessary that makes them a fool. Or if they spend less, their system is junk and they know nothing. We see people get quite agitated to the point of name calling because not everyone accepts their view that CDs are better than vinyl, etc. I think these are the attitudes that inhibit constructive discussion. |
Not at all. They are different things.
It is a culture war that has arisen in audio. I suspect this a similar phenomena to the polarisation we see in politics due to the internet and social media. Each side believes theirs is the true faith. All nuance has been squeezed out.
No. Qualitative data is non-numerical. That doesn't mean it's subjective.
Qualitative data is not at all synonymous with subjectivity. Qualitative data can be objective, just as quantitative data can subjective. Just because numbers are involved in quantitative data doesn't make it any more valid than qualitative data. |
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