get over yourselves :)
Good you were here to help people get their heads on straight. Any more advice to help us be better people?
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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Why? Because there is no regulation in this industry. Snake oil salesman can lie right to your face about their expensive speaker cable sounding better than a coat hanger. And because priming is a real thing, some people believe it. Then they hop on forums like Audiogon and spread those lies, in many cases earnestly believing them. They aren't true audiophiles, but claim to be. And it's killing the hobby. |
The video is articulating what hopefully many of us already know, so it's not like the info shared is the 2nd coming of audiophile wisdom. Question is which parameters we believe are the primary ones to address first, and here the convenient bypass is not only acoustics. Also, where in the process are you? In a well-implemented, highly resolving and transparent setup swapping out a cable for a relatively modest outlay can make a difference akin to making an upgrade to a DAC that's much more expensive. And so forth.. |
Regulation? How would that work? For what? Enforced how? And how is it "killing the hobby" when it seems that earbuds and smart phones are also hard at work killing the hobby. Really, @squared80 please expand on this. |
@squared80 You have pushed the ASR and Cheap Audio Man mantra to an extreme level. Realize they are being payed to play the anti-HEA characters which might be an exaggerated or even fake act. Maybe you are being showered with "Snake Oil". |
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