So, what is the most important ? The source, the amplification or the transducer? I think it's a combined effort, and here's why:
Now I've seen a lot of almost philosophical approaches to hi-fi, or rather music-reproduction. Let me give you my 2 cents.
It has been a while, but I've been selling Hifi-equipment for fifteen years, hearing and weighing the weirdest arguments. Usually there are three sides or convictions..
A. The source is the most important. Obviously, if you start with a crappy signal how can you expect good results ?
I think they are correct. If you use a bad recording, or a good recording on a bad source, a good set-up should let you hear just that. It should sound like a bad start.
B. The amplification is the most important. It's like the engine in your car: There's no substitute for cubic inches.. You need power to move !
I think they are correct. If you use an amplifier that can't control the movement of your speakers ( or headphones ) how can you expect to enjoy the end result. Your transducer will do all kinds of things it is not supposed to do.. That makes for a bad finish as well.
C. The loudspeaker/headphone is by far the most important. If the air that reaches your eardrums isn't moving correctly, what can you expect ? It'll all be a waste of time and money..
I think they are correct. If that beautiful and electronically correct signal is not translated into moving air-molecules the way it is supposed to.. Well, what's the point of it all, really.
D. was mostly not even considered until I mentioned it. Room acoustics. Just compare a heavily carpeted bedroom to a fully tiled-up bathroom. Headphones were the perfect solution for D. Nowadays you can use digital room-correction software we didn't have back then, Dirac comes to mind.
F. are the cables, powerlines etcetera, but believe me, it follows the same pattern.
Now my own enjoying-music philosophy has always been a combination. For comparison I used four sheets of glass to look through. All four ( three if you use headphones ) are dirty. You can see what's on the other side, but the view is murky at best. To get a better view you start cleaning one of the glass sheets. After a proper cleaning you put it back, and who would have guessed.. The entire picture looks a little better.
So, it was not that difficult to convince anyone who was completely and utterly stuck on either A,B or C that it was pointless to spend hours ( translate that into a lot of money ) on their sheet of glass if the other sheets were still rather dirty.. Clean up the dirtiest ( there's always one ) and enjoy the view.. ehh.. music.. Then look for your next project.
I just replaced my Asgard3 with a Jotunheim, and I hear the difference, even with my cheapo sennheiser earbuds, more so with my HD660S.
Like I said, just my 2 cents..
Eagerly awaiting my Modius sometimes next week..
I like your sheets of glass analogy.
Going through A-F:
A) Yes, you're not going to make a bad source sound better, but at least in the modern digital to analog world, the differences between the sound coming from the DAC in my iPhone vs. a TOTL $100,000 DAC, are nowhere near the differences between good and bad speakers. So the weight put on this portion of the audio chain in terms of dollars spent, shouldn't be too great. In the case of my own system, 20% of the cost went into Yggdrasil, four years ago, which may be more than is warranted relative to the rest of my system, but I still have no feeling like I need to upgrade here. If you're heavily into vinyl (that's what I grew up with), then you should be spending far more than what I have into my turntable and cartridge.
B & C) I think these go together to a large degree. There are some very good, efficient, but expensive speakers on the market, that don't require the same level of amplification as say a pair of Magnepans. I think the end goal should be to maximize the sound quality to your ears and spend the least amount of money on the speakers and power amps combined, but where they are a good match for each other. I guess you could say the same thing about the whole system overall, although matching the amps to the speakers isn't just a matter of sound quality of each of them independent of the other.
D) This is very overlooked (with speakers). I recently moved my speakers about 6" farther away from the wall and adjusted them so they weren't toed in as much. The difference was dramatic. I need to spend more time playing around with this to try to find the ideal positioning for my room and seating position.
F) I wouldn't want to be using some scrawny, unshielded RCA cables that came free with a $100 piece of gear I purchased years ago, to connect components in my $10,000 system, but good quality cables don't need to cost much. Power cables? There's 50' of ordinary 12 gauge Romex running between my electrical panel and the duplex receptacle that most of my audio system is feeding off of. Having the last 3-4' of electrical cord being made out of cryogenically treated, silver plated, 8 gauge braided wire, isn't going to make a difference, unless maybe those cables are designed to shield the AC from affecting the signal of line level cables that they are near? In the tangled mess of cables coming out of your audio components, my understanding is that it's best to keep AC power cords away from your other cables if possible, and that if they need to cross paths, it's better to do so at a 90 degree angle than to run parallel for any length. If there's noise on that circuit from fluorescent lights, motors, etc. that may be an issue, depending on the components and their power supplies.
There's no magical proportion of what should be spent on various parts of the system. There's something nice in feeling like one or more parts of your system are at a level of performance that you don't see yourself wanting to upgrade them for many years. That's the way I feel about my speakers, my Aegir amps, and my Yggdrasil A1. Before I got my Salk speakers, I checked with Jim Salk to ask if it would be okay to temporarily use a an older Harman Kardon AV receiver that I had, as my power amp. It's a heavy receiver with class A/B amplification. You could probably buy one used today for $40-50. That was driving my new $5000 pair of speakers for some time. I clearly had no plans for that to be the long term amp solution, but it was a short term solution, and I'm happy with the approach I took. I would rather do that than have ordered a lesser speaker and a new amp at the same time, but always felt that I made a compromise and that I wanted to upgrade both of them down the road.
I think that turntables and cartridges are a very mature market, and we're not seeing dramatic improvements, so a $1000 well spent today, should still represent a good value five years from now, assuming that you like vinyl.
Amplifiers seem to be a fairly mature market. Jason and others outside of Schiit continue to come up with new ideas. Class D amps I'm sure will continue to improve. From an audiophile standpoint though, even Schiit's relatively new Aegir is being compared to many vintage class A amps. There's just a lot money that goes into the materials to create a great amplifier, until someone is perhaps able to come up with a much better class D implementation. As far as headamps are concerned, I would guess that it falls in the same category.
Speakers and headphones again seem to be a fairly mature market. People are obviously always coming up with new designs. No doubt that there continue to be better materials available, and computer analysis probably helps aid in designing better drivers and overall systems, and just over time, people will come up with better overall sounding systems, because who wants to listen to something that sounds worse than yesterday's HD800 or HE-6.
DACs seem to me seem like the one place in particular that the product that you buy today could easily be surpassed in terms of performance, by something far cheaper, just a few years down the road. You can't recreate a turntable, or a power amp, or a speaker/headphone on a $1 chip, but it doesn't seem outside the realm of possibilities that Yggdrasil type performance could be on a $1 chip down the road. I'm not an EE, so there may be any number of considerations that I'm overlooking, which partially refute that. I've been enjoying my Yggdrasil for 4+ years and have no desire to upgrade, but it seems to me like the most likely candidate to be an anchor weight down the road, or at least be somewhat ordinary in terms of performance. Based on that, I wouldn't recommend spending big money on a DAC, until you're really quite happy with your headphones/headamp or speakers/power amp(s).
