I used to love finding new components, or getting the one piece I need to finish my stereo. And then one day, I did!
Twenty years later, it still seems odd, somehow, to not be changing it. It works every day, and the only thing I do is maintenance.
My equalizer failed, and it seems that no one makes equalizers anymore! At least all I can find is crap on Amazon. I finally found a guy on ebay that had a restored exact model of mine, and he lived in the city! Now the system is back to being done.
In the long documentary, around the time he got the diagnosis, but before the decline started, he said he was finished with it, although he hadn’t fitted cartridges to the tone arms for some reason. He admitted he would still be doing some tweaking, and in the pictures in the Post article, there are two new “small” speakers (only about four feet tall) between the center tower and the left and right towers, so presumably he built them shortly after that.
But he also said that the room had been silent for five and a half years before that point because everything wasn’t ready. 
He also said this:
If he hadn’t nearly destroyed his family while pursuing his dreams, I’d say he was an eccentric idealist who was pursuing excellence to an extreme. But from the outside, it sure doesn’t seem that the collateral damage along that journey was justified or worth the cost. I suspect his first wife and estranged elder son feel that way.
BTW, did you notice that the room had at least three or four tall grandfather clocks that seemed nearly identical? He didn’t explicitly say so, but I gathered that he bought the movements, then built the clock cases himself.
The problem with seeking ‘perfection’ in audio is that there is no such thing. There is so much variability in room shape, acoustic treatments, quality of hearing, shape of the ears, yada yada that music exists in a sea of noise and subjectivity.
Most people with expensive audio systems are older, because they’re the ones who can afford it. Older people also suffer from hearing loss, and that loss will be orders of magnitude greater than the difference between two decent stereo setups. People will argue all day long that this speaker is better than that speaker because its frequency response is better at 21,000 hz. In the meantime, they can no longer hear anything about 12,000.
I imagine you’d get a better improvement in perceived sound by having a recent ear cleaning than by swapping out $10,000 speakers for $100,000 speakers. But you never see services for helping audiophiles improve their own hearing, because audiophiles convince themselves that they have ‘golden ears’ and can hear things your mundane music listener cannot.
If some guy was an asshole, that’s a shame (maybe he could have gotten involved with/inspired some like-minded individuals?), but that does not mean, especially if money is no object, that it may not be fun tinkering with clockwork, sound reproduction,
digital signal processing, electromechanical systems, etc.
Example homebrew project:
http://trevormarshall.com/ground-effect-omni/
I’ve got nothing against good quality sound - I have a set of Paradigm studio series speakers in my home theater. All five speakers cost about $5,000. They are driven by an Onkyo Receiver worth about $1500.
To me,that’s the inflection point. If you spend more money than this, it will not result in much better sound, and at the very least the cost/benefit ratio really begins to suck.
There are endless examples out there of people failing blind listening tests between cheap and very expensive hardware. I remember on test were they put out a very expensive reciver and a cheap one, and asked people to choose which one sounded better.
Unbeknownst to the subjects, behind the scenes the switches were reversed so that the cheap receiver played when the expensive one was chosen. Everyone either couldn’t tell the difference, or chose the ‘expensive’ receiver, which was actually the cheap one.
In another test, subjects were asked to discern between a super high end speaker wire and regular speaker wire. Again, the subjects chose the ‘high end’ speaker wire set, or said they couldn’t hear a difference. The ‘high end’ speaker wire was a rusy coat hanger.
As a result, bringing up blind listening tests will get you kicked off a lot of audiophile music boards, The subject is verboten.
Our brains are very powerful when it comes to processing music and sound. Check this out:
Is it any wonder that people can convince themselves that the thing they just spent big money on makes music sound better?
Here’s another example of how a little priming can completely change your perception of what you are hearing:
Those are both freaky!
I’d never experienced auditory illusions, just optical.!
This is like the Blue/Gold dress.
If you hit replay and think “Brainstorm” - that’s what it sounds like. If you do it again and prime yourself to hear “Green Needle,” that’s what you’ll hear.
enjoy:
It never stops! How high can it go?? It’s going to destroy the universe!
Pssst, @Sam_Stone: you made many of the same points in this very thread three and a half years ago.
Yeah. It’s hard to keep track.
The passage of time itself is an illusion.
You should have kept records.
:flees:
If you listen very closely and just follow one single tone and mentally ignore the rest you can hear each ascending tone fade and stop. But because they fade out gradually and are surrounded by other tones going up, you don’t notice
Tier 1 is obviously not fraudulent becaues it has to cost something to produce sound equipment. Tier 3 is obviously fraudulent because it involves meaningless babble. But Tier 2 is the real battleground because it is where even sensible people can get fooled.
No matter what you say, I simply won’t believe you or anyone else that there is an actual improvement between $10,000 and $30,000 speakers without double blind testing. As Sam_Stone says, it’s known for a fact that people’s perceptions are unreliable in this area. The $30,000 speakers might sound better - I’m not denying there can be differences - but it isn’t possible to know without double blind testing, and as others have said, such testing is frowned upon amongst audiophiles precisely (I assume) because it would show much of the industry - and their customers - to be suckers.
Audio is often a strange and subjective thing. Among many other things, audio quality is extremely dependent on the acoustics of the environment, including speaker placement. If you have decent equipment to start with, you can often do more to improve sound quality by modifying the environment with appropriate acoustic materials than by spending thousands more on audio equipment. The trouble is you have to know what you’re doing and be willing to do it, whereas any fool can spend inordinate amounts of money on fancy-looking audio gear. Fortunately for many of these idiots, normal home furnishings like couches, carpets, and drapes are often conducive to an acoustically balanced environment.
As an aside that I mentioned somewhere else, I had an interesting experience with my desktop computer speakers recently that illustrates some of the mysterious weirdnesses of audio. It’s a really excellent pair of speakers plus subwoofer for which I paid a ridiculous amount of money many years ago, but it was well worth it because the quality has brought me so much pleasure for so many years. But one day all of a sudden they sounded absolutely terrible – just very tinny and completely lacking in bass response. It turned out that a cable to the subwoofer had come loose, but what was interesting is how important the subwoofer was in this particular speaker system and the wide range of frequencies that it actually covered. In my home theater/stereo system, I have no subwoofer at all, but the large three-way speakers can reproduce frequencies down to the sub-audible level.
But the really interesting discovery with my computer speakers was the following. One might question the wisdom of a design that has the subwoofer covering such a broad range of frequencies, since it’s sitting under the desk and contributes nothing to stereophonic imaging. And one would be wrong – very wrong. These speakers in fact produce the best stereo imaging I have ever experienced. When a sound is supposed to be coming from the center, it appears to be coming right from the center of the monitor, and not at all from the speakers.
But the most amazing thing is that all sounds – left, right, center, and everywhere in between, are rich in full-frequency bass response, and the bass seems extremely directional. The subwoofer under the desk doesn’t appear to be doing anything, yet it’s doing some major heavy lifting.
Someone suggested that what’s happening is that the desktop speakers are emitting high-frequency harmonic counterparts to the lower frequencies actually produced by the subwoofer, and our audio sensory perceptions are fooled into believing that the low frequencies are actually coming from the desktop speakers. It may sound sketchy, but it’s absolutely real and totally amazing. Audio is weird.
Many years ago a friend of mine lost his job at a high end audio store because of a complaint made about him by Jacque Cousteau.
Cousteau wanted to buy some horribly expensive equipment and my friend pointed out that at his age, his ears were not able to appreciate the difference between what he was going to purchase and a similar set up thousands of dollars cheaper.
The customer was offended and complained.
In my humble and definitely non-expert opinion, I think the idea that we old farts “cannot hear” sounds above or below a certain frequency is, while true, likely grossly overly simplistic when it comes to the quality of audio systems. Let’s take the example of someone who we will designate as “Old Fart A”. Mr. A has been determined in systematic testing to be unable to detect any sound of lower frequency than “X” or higher frequency than “Y”. Does this mean than Mr. A could not tell the difference between audio equipment capable of only the X-to-Y range and audio equipment capable of a much wider range?
My opinion is that he absolutely could tell the difference. For two reasons. One is the obvious fact that the equipment with the broader frequency range exhibits other attributes of higher quality, such as uniform frequency response and lower distortion. That’s the most obvious and straightforward argument about why Old Farts are justifiably entitled to good audio equipment.
The other argument is more subtle but no less compelling. Our brains are incredibly good at compensating for sensory losses. My previous post, about how deep bass sounds appear to be coming out of my desktop speakers when they absolutely are not, is somewhat related to that. The quality of the sound that we hear is highly subjective and is not something that can be measured by instruments stuck in our ears. We could, for instance, be enjoying the secondary harmonics of sounds outside our hearing range.
Well, from a business perspective, when someone wants to spend lots of money, you should let them. 
But seriously, don’t dis the customer. Rule 1.
But not all men of a certain age have hearing loss. Mine is still pretty good, because I always used hearing protection on machinery when I was young. Kids, use your ear plugs! Your old self will thank you later.