T
the record spot
Guest
aliEnRIK said:Top of the list for me are 'EARS'. I find it intriguing that those people that swear there are no differences between cables and you can get 98% sound out of budget gear whilst needing to spend 10k to get 2% more are living on cloud cuckoo land. That, or the item at the top of my list is failing them.
I said a week or so back that you can achieve as good as 90% (and probably more) when it comes to high quality sound and the price you pay for decent budget gear today. I stand by that. Simply listening tells you all you need to know on that score.
Did the £11,500 system I heard the other week in Audio Emotion do 11 times better than a £1000 system. No. It was good, but nothing that made me think "wow". Impressive, but impressive can be levelled at all price points more easily now than ever before.
However, I digress. Having now compared many interconnects, with the most recent being my £30-odd QED Qunex 2 against an Atlas Navigator I picked up - which retailed for £225 originally - and found no major differences between the two, I remain happy in my conclusions that I don't need to test this theory anymore for my purposes. Moving the speakers around will give me more gains in sound change than a cable will ever do. Period.
£225 buys a LOT of new music. Or almost 23 months of Spotify Premium membership. What would you take given the choice...?
I use Spotify on my £200 Nokia E55 as well as at home on the computer, it streams a 320kbps file through a pair of £30 Sennheiser CX-300-IIs, and it's superb. It's a no brainer for me. Others of course may differ, but I can't use a cable to listen to music at work, on the train, on a plane, in the car or walking around Edinburgh, or anywhere else for that matter.
I'm fast coming to the belief that hifi as it stands is rooted in the past. The likes of one trick pony stereo amps that do nothing else but two-channel amplficiation are an anachronism now, as is the vast majority of high end stuff, which is more design statement than audio achievement in many cases.
XTZ and Harman Kardon are showing the way in delivering real world power, onboard DACs, fine build and sensible pricing in their amps, not some SET with half a watt costing £25000 that'll need a pair of room sized boxes with 400db sensitivity costing twice as much again. AV receivers deliver all-round capability, DACs, the means to handle hi-res, master audio, blu-ray audio and the rest. Yamaha's RX-V1067, Onkyo's 808 and the new 609 are but three examples and this is the way forward.