Am I done yet? LOL
Things are sounding pretty good at the moment. The Dynaudio Contour 30i speakers are the latest addition and are working better in this room than the Maggie 3.7i speakers were.
Usually, when I ask the wife to come listen, she'll sit for a song, maybe 2, then make a "that's nice" type a comment and leave. With the Dynaudio speakers, she stayed, and played song after song. She listened for over and hour and said she really really liked these speakers. Great to know the wife was pleased. 
But the audiophile in me feels like there is more to be had. The amp & pre-amp are on my radar as the possible candidates for improvement. Any opinions on where to head next? (There's always a "next" isn't there?)
Maybe, for some of us, speakers being (mostly) big and/or heavy, hard to get past our partners, and hard to find, are the last things we generally tend to change. Speakers, which I work very seriously to get right when I commit to changing up, tended to stay, say, three to five times longer than almost any component I’ve ever had. In fact, in over 35 years in the hobby, I’ve had five sets of diligently researched and loved speakers. And it’s only because a good portion of that was spent in apartments in New York City, I couldn’t hold on to any speakers I wasn’t using. I certainly would have hoarded some of them if I had a good basement or garage anywhere along the way- before we committed to a real house. Amps come in second. You can live with a good amp for a long time. My in and out component sickness has always been preamps and DACs. Both are infinitely more interesting to screw around with, for me. I’ve had dozens of both. Solid state, tubes- it’s all good. And the thing with the tube units, I don’t have to switch it up so quickly if I come down with a little audio nervosa, I can obsess with different tubes. |
https://forum.audiogon.com/posts/2911612 @kennyc , I’d say in retrospect, the budget was probably what made it most fun in those years when money and or space was tight. The challenge of getting that sound you were hearing in your head with practically no money and having to sell something to get something. For me, it kind of trained me to get it right and make good decisions. I fucked up a time or two, but I’ve had magnificent rigs- scratch that, very satisfying rigs that made me happy on not a lot of money. There are classic no-brainer components- some of them kind of old, but there’s some of the greatest pieces of equipment ever put out there for Lo-Fi prices. I found my bottom feeding years were probably the most fun I’ve had in the hobby. You really had to do some ’audio calculus’ that often times worked. |
