This weekend a friend of mine called me for advice. It seems he is ready to make the move to high end audio but looking through Stereophile and going to two audio dealers convinced him that he was going to have to spend more than $15,000 to get a "decent" system to which he said "I am not in a position to spend that kind of money right now".
We discussed several option including Emotiva (which I highly recommend) and CD'eviers along with some great inexpensive speaker options. This seemed to calm him down but he then called me a couple of hours later after reading some of the posts here in the forum. He had come to the conclusion that the Ayre CD5 was a great CD player but then he looked at a Marantz and Sony for $1500 and said "can I really hear $4500 in difference between these models and the Ayre? My advice of course was to head to an audio dealer with some of his favorite CD's and take a listen as he is the only one that can determine that.
As we continued to talk he said "I just want the best system for the dollars that I can afford" to which I replied that when you start to put together your system even Mr Harley says "start with a budget in mind". Now let's face it that is what we ALL want isn't it? But for audiophiles there is a lot of excitement we get from getting a new component. If we pay more is there a placebo effect? Could be...I'm not really sure. We would all love to be able to spend $1500 and get the performance of that Ayre 5 but since we can't we just want to get as close as we can to audio orgasm for our ears.
Being an audiophile is great as with a good system you can hear why some many artists are great musicians rather than packaged products like so many of todays artists. No matter what we have in our system there will be people who swear that a $6,000 CD players sounds better than a $1500 CD player. The bottom line though is that most of us will never be able to afford prices like these and just want audio nervonna for less expensive dollars. Be happy with what you have
This weekend a friend of mine called me for advice. It seems he is ready to make the move to high end audio but looking through Stereophile and going to two audio dealers convinced him that he was going to have to spend more than $15,000 to get a "decent" system to which he said "I am not in a position to spend that kind of money right now".
We discussed several option including Emotiva (which I highly recommend) and CD'eviers along with some great inexpensive speaker options. This seemed to calm him down but he then called me a couple of hours later after reading some of the posts here in the forum. He had come to the conclusion that the Ayre CD5 was a great CD player but then he looked at a Marantz and Sony for $1500 and said "can I really hear $4500 in difference between these models and the Ayre? My advice of course was to head to an audio dealer with some of his favorite CD's and take a listen as he is the only one that can determine that.
As we continued to talk he said "I just want the best system for the dollars that I can afford" to which I replied that when you start to put together your system even Mr Harley says "start with a budget in mind". Now let's face it that is what we ALL want isn't it? But for audiophiles there is a lot of excitement we get from getting a new component. If we pay more is there a placebo effect? Could be...I'm not really sure. We would all love to be able to spend $1500 and get the performance of that Ayre 5 but since we can't we just want to get as close as we can to audio orgasm for our ears.
Being an audiophile is great as with a good system you can hear why some many artists are great musicians rather than packaged products like so many of todays artists. No matter what we have in our system there will be people who swear that a $6,000 CD players sounds better than a $1500 CD player. The bottom line though is that most of us will never be able to afford prices like these and just want audio nervonna for less expensive dollars. Be happy with what you have