[Audio Empire]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2012 05:50:12 -0700, Arny Krueger wrote
(in article ):

"Audio Empire" wrote in message
...

I can hear the howls of derision now from certain parties who post here
regularly. I'm out of my mind. There can just be no other explanation for
it!

You're not out of your mind, you're just too biased.

Pot, kettle, black!

OK. Tonight I go to an audio acquaintance's home to try to solve a puzzle.
This guy has a damn good system. His speakers are fairly new Wilson
Sasha's.
His amps are Nelson Pass XS-150 monoblocks and his pre-amp is an Classe
CP-700. His front end is a Marantz SA-11S2 SACD/CD player. Recently he
bought a Weiss dac202U digital to analog converter connected via Firewire
to
a MacBook Pro running Amarra.

Somebody clearly has money to burn. If he has spent as much time doing
reliable listening tests as he has obviously put into sighted evaluations,
his system would no doubt be very different.

Maybe, maybe not. This is all good stuff, now I agree with you, that there is
no need to spend this level of money to get this level of performance,
however, there's no doubt that the money he spent got him very decent
sound. The amp/preamp ensemble is clean, the speakers are very good, the
source components are excellent. Even the realitively inexpensive turntable
does a better than average job.

I wouldn't have bought that stuff. There is no need, but then bling doesn't
matter to me as much as sheer performance does. .

Several moths ago, his father-in-law passed away leaving him a
considerable
classical record collection. Our friend had no record player but his
Classe
preamp did come with a phono preamp option. Not really being all that
interested in records, but being nonetheless curious about the record
collection he'd inherited, he purchased a Music Hall MMF5.1 turntable
ensemble for around $900 complete with arm and "Music Hall" branded MM
cartridge (which I suspect is really a British Goldring).

Doesn't even sound like the best stuff or even anything close.

I think that's the point. "An under $1K phono rig "outperforms" a $7K DAC -
one of the darlings of the high-end set."

The dilemma is this. Right along, Our Friend has been purchasing
High-Resolution downloads of things that interested him from HDTracks.
Recently he bought the Antal Dorati/London Symphony 24/176.4 download of
The
music of Borodin and Rimsky Korsakov. Using his Mac and Amarra to stream
the
recording to his Weiss DAC, he was very impressed with the purchase until
he
found that his father-in-law had a copy of the original issue from 1961 on
Mercury Living Presence LP. Just for the hell of it, he decided to give
the
LP a spin on his $1000 turntable rig. Expecting to laugh it off the
turntable, he was startled to find that the LP sounded better than the HD
download through his $7000 DAC!.

The myth that is hidden in this anecdote is the idea that human preferences,
which Science knows to be very capricious, has nothing to do with the
outcome, and that the perception of better sound described therein was
actually a reliable objective truth.

The truth hidden in the myth of this anecdote is that if people think that
the LP sounds superior to digital, then it does. The reason might be, as
someone else suggested that the CDs were substandard transfers of the
masters, and even though I don't believe that (I have all of the Mercury CDs
that interest me and for the most part, Ms. Fine did a splendid job), it
might have some merit. The audio hobby is about personal enjoyment of music
more than it about absolutes. We can tell someone that cables and
interconnects all sound the exactly the same, but if he believes otherwise,
then what of it? Sure, I think it's criminal that companies like Nordost and
Crystal are selling interconnects that cost multiple thousands of dollars and
perform no differently than a pair of throw-away interconnect cables costing
pennies, but if someone thinks that their many thousands of dollars
investment in cables and interconnects has improved the sound of their stereo
systems, who am I (or you, for that matter) to tell them they've been ripped
off. If they can afford that kind of bling, the I say let them have at it!

BTW, the stereo system owner in this anecdote called me last night to tell me
that he'd spent one of the best audio weekends of his life. After I left,
Friday, he dug into his FIL's record collection looking for treasures and
thoroughly enjoyed his voyage of discovery. I say, good on him!