Audiophilia is a church, and you gotta believe. I've caught myself more than few times buying into it, only to "come to Jesus" with some rational thinking and in-home A/B tests.
There's good stuff out there. I have a Rotel RA-1060 that I really like the sound of. It's great for low-level listening with it's unnatural emphasis of highs (with roll-off on the extremes for a smoothing effect), and a slightly powerful bottom end. Other amps do things differently... like how the Arcam A65+ achieves it's unique signature with emhasis on pinpoint mid-range frequencies for "detail" and a little reverb for a "depth of soundstage" effect. You are buying "sound engineering" more than accurate sound reproduction. Most of the better stuff off the shelf at Circuit City can do accuracy fairly well and at an opimized consumer friendly price point. But accuracy is not what Arcam, Rega, or even NAD are selling. It's their unique take on the audio domain... how to make things a little better with a combination of clean/quality amplifier design and audio tweakery. The irony of these brands eschewing tone controls for "purity" should be noted. Think about the $1000 Rega Jupiter CD player. Dealer markup is substantial -- at least $400, leaving $600 on the table. This must be true, as I can buy a brand new Apollo, after some haggling, for $690 from a local authorized dealer. How much does the distributer take? What's Rega's profit? How much is lost in currency conversion? Supply chain inefficiences and lack of manufacturing scale? End of day, the cost of components is probably not much more than your typical Sony CD player. But that's OK, considering you understand that what you are buying is far more than what's under the hood, with benefits mostly of the emotional kind. But the interconnect / power cable "industry" is all snake-oil and marketing. I compared, over a several week period, a $5 set of el cheapos with a $100 set of Kimber Toniks. Both through the same output of an Arcam CD73 (dual outs) into an a65+. Every once in a while I'd change inputs to see if I could spot a difference. Sometimes I'd go a week without changing. I asked my wife to randomly change inputs to test if I ever noticed. Never noticed. I sold the cables on Ebay went with a $20 pair... only reason I spent $20 was "just in case". I'd hypthesize that this is the leading insight driving cable purchases: a very rational fear that one may not be experiencing the full effect of an expensive stereo purchase. It's a perfect opportunity at point of sale to play on such fears and add 10% pure profit to the bill for the retailer. The negative effect of all of this is a healthy dose of skepticism of the entire audiophile-component industry. I think Rega is on to this, which why they recommend against expensive cables in their documentation. -- FatElvis2000 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FatElvis2000's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=6725 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=31758 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
