Unexpected Results

Dave,

A fantastic post, and one that resonates very much with me almost word for word.

You are not alone. 

You'd best start hankering after a CD555 :-)

Dispair not there's plenty of upgrade potential on the vinyl side and you never know, one day digitally recorded music will catch up and pass it.

Dave, great post and uncomfortably familiar. I am not in 500 territory yet but I do recognise the side-effects you describe.

As one goes up the (long in the case of Naim) upgrade path one if often guilty of listening to the system rather than the music, particularly after a recent upgrade. The need to validate the expenditure is often the cause. Things then calm down, and you start to enjoy the music anew via the new shiney bit if kit. Then the ears become accustomed to the improvement and the brain starts to get greedy for more. The plotting and planning for the next upgrade fix then starts and so it goes on.

I do now try to plot and plan for the end game but who am I kidding.

I have found that as I improved my system - mainly to be able to replay complex music which I enjoy, that the differences between some music became rather larger than it was before.

I succeeded in achieving what I wanted in the main, but did find as newer music came along I did find that some more modern recordings began to annoy me more than they did previously. These still sounded better than before, but the older better-recorded music was just so stupidly superior it was difficult to switch between these in a session, so the way I listen has now changed somewhat.

The main reasons for disappointment, in my opinion obviously, when having purchased expensive equipment and listening to the end result is poor installation and set-up. Unfortunately there persists a view that the more you spend the less set-up is needed and the opposite is very true from my experience.

Once properly installed on Fraim with all cables dressed and cables loosely running to their destinations - not cable-tied up to make it look neat - then it should delight and you should not be feeling the way you describe.

Life changes us and we respond differently as we age, but I for one have the opposite problem of getting rather too emotional to music and needing a break to recover!

Perhaps I need to down-grade.

DB.

Congratulations on reaching your goal, I hope you enjoy it for many years to come.  I think it is hard to match any/many of the feelings we have in our youth - all those hormones and emotional changes and all those new experiences make it a special if sometimes challenging time.  I love music now and always have but I doubt I will ever experience the thrill of hearing my first Rush album at fourteen or of listening to those tunes on the radio that were hard wired into my emotions again.  In the same way I will never feel that scary exciting first date feeling again but I'd like to think that its been replaced by a deeper wiser love that lets me appreciate what I have, and that applies just as much to my music that I can now listen to with the benefit of experience hard bought over many years.  Enjoy what you have and listen to the music.  Best wishes, David

Great post can relate to a lot out of your post. While I noticed that the goal is still moving by little details (cabbles, NAS drive, rack...). So you're never totally at the end.

I have to now get to piece with my music collection which is getting too big :-)

HH,

I can see why my post may appear a bit sad but it was not intended that way. I certainly do not need any sympathy having acquired a quite wonderful system. What I was trying to convey were some unexpected experiences that might be interesting. What I certainly wanted to avoid was broadcasting "I've got a new this or that" and get the normal platitudes in reply. "I've got one too"; "they are great"; "attaboy". The cash is spent - I did my self justification before purchase!

The end of the project feeling was no real biggie and most folks will have found this in most walks of life. It was obviously far outweighed by the satisfaction in owning and enjoying the equipment. Again I tried to allude to this in the first post by saying I was not going there. There it also, for me, great pride in ownership and I enjoy this in many other terms whether it be a watch or a particular instrument. As I do play music and have done so since I was a young lad, part of my ambition was to have a system where music was rendered by instruments that sounded like instruments. I am there now. The poor recording dilemma is common - there is a certain Amy Winehouse LP is shall never play again as it is car stereo or worse standard. I shall disagree with you on better kit being less prone to these worries - if the data is not recorded, the system won't produce it. My admission about the great sounding media search was just a confession of a recent and first time guilty secret. Don't hold it against me.

One other occurrence was the time slowing down phenomena. I got this straight out of the box - I can't recall who posted this in the last month or so. Anyway, I've just done with the 4 Tops CD and hearing James Jamerson laying the bass down, I can assure all that time and timing is spot on after all. You could set your watch by that bloke.

DB:- I couldn't agree more about set up. I think you even provided some suggestions when I posted about losing SQ when I supercapped my Superline. It was a pain but I got the result in the end but this required freeing up a shelf by buying a Vulkan for the TT. I'm not sure if even a Statement could recapture for me the straight to the heart emotions of music as a teen. I can happily say that I shall never find out if this is true. But as above, listening to 4 Tops/JJ pumping out those syncopated bass lines, I had to smile.

Dave

dayjay,

I've just seen your post. I think you have described the teen years and maturity better than I could. I could not agree more with you.

Dave

Is it possible that something is wrong? Of course, it’s different for all of us and will always be highly subjective. My doubt arises because the higher up the chain I have gone, the more I have been able to appreciate the music and the less bothered I have been by what I previously thought were inferior recordings.  I have often seen similar observations posted. A 552/500 tends to cut through a lot of this and gets to the heart. The exception being (at least in my case) stuff which is brick walled to shit. Nothing can save that and I have become a lot more choosy about what I buy based on published DR values. That aside, as a rule of thumb, if a system steers you towards narrowing your listening selection for optimal playback quality, something is likely amiss.

I think we try to recapture the feelings we experienced in our youth in a variety of ways. In doing this we set ourselves up for failure every time. I listen nowadays to the same tunes on my LP12 that I used to listen to on my $400 Yamaha TT in my teens, and something is missing. I take a drive now in my nice old Chevy, and compared to driving my old heap when I was 17, something is missing.

Some have extra marital affairs, some wear fancy clothes/watches/or the occasional python boot, and some buy ludicrously priced audio kit, etc, but it just doesn't do it. I see old people trying to act like they are 1/2 their age, and they just come across looking foolish IMO.

The best minds in marketing know all this, and make a killing as a result.

Solution: Realize that we are all just chasing our tails in various ways, and that we are never going to "catch" them...enjoy what you have in the present context and you have solved most of the problem.

Either that, or you have set up issues.

Enjoy your new gear.

BBM

I didn't embark on this journey to recapture the past. But I do take your point overall. I'm very contented where I am right now. I would never go back to those days. All those mistakes to make, exams in summer, no money, the list goes on. Happy enjoying Box Scaggs and a single malt!

Dave

Right on, Dave. While there certainly were many downsides to being a teen, I still vividly remember the overwhelming thrill the first time I stood in front of my buck naked girlfriend.

Off now to listen to "Night Moves"...

Just kidding. Have a nice evening.

BBM

Gees, BORING,  you lot are like all my friends stuck in the 1980s.   I can see you have a problem if you are stuck replaying your youth.  I can't listen to 90% of my music collection from the 1980s and i have a  crazy expensive hifi as well.

ok, this may not be to your taste but this was recorded yesterday.  

https://m.youtube.com/watch?eb...Gg&v=7udwea5-psY

Or this one If you like something more english ( music not the band) instead of Aussie

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f1sgpdOmN5E

These are covers, but of recent music.  The bands are young but they are really into edploring music. This is the stuff that works fo me on the big system, or in the car or on an ipad.

My original post was not about pining for the halcyon days of spotty youth. Apologies if this is how you read it. 

Dave

Badger, I really enjoyed your post, a pleasure to read.

It makes me think about how I feel when I have finally  obtained an "Object of my Desire", for example a new kitchen or car. Initially I am enthralled with the shiny newness of the object and how aesthetically pleasing it is. Early use of the new object can be associated with a minor degree of trepidation. I might think " I have paid $xxx for this, so it better bloody well be good", and initially in this hyper aware state I find fault with the new toy. After a while this hypervigelence settles, and then, gradually I really enjoy my new aquisition.

Sorry, not very well written and different from your experiance, just my take on reaching a personal "Nirvana".

My perception of the effect of advances in my system was rather the opposite way round: not that badly recorded music sounded worse, rather they didn't improve in the way better recordings did.

I can picture that feeling of anticlimax when someone intent on building a system up to a particular level finally gets there, which I suspect is a partly a consequence of 'upgradeitis' rather than having reached a goal. I kicked myself of that habit many years ago, recognising that it creates a focus on the equipment not the music. To do it I found to do that I had to stop reading HiFi press (always before I'd buy at least one HiFi mag a month), since when I only catch up with latest developments when some piece of kit reache's end of life.

As for the boring stuck in the 80s viewpoint, to me enjoyable music is always enjoyable - mind you, I've always eschewed 'pop' and transient flavour-of-the-day (other than in the way every new album has a tendency to get more than its fair share of playing for a while, instead going for music that resonates with me, whether that is rock or classical or anything else. As a consequence I still have probably 95% of all the music I've ever bought, and will happily listen to any one of my albums - and I get the same enjoyment listening to something I've had for 40 years as something  last week. To me music is timeless, while the effect of any given piece can vary, presumably according to my mood: sometimes I just enjoy it for what it is, sometimes I may hear some nuance I never noticed before in a piece I've heard hundreds of times, and sometimes it transports me back to a time and place.

Achieved a system far beyond what I ever thought I'd aspire to.  Always the means to the end - enjoy the music.

Great posts, luckily for me hifi gear and speakers are expensive, otherwise I'd be a hoarder!

I would recommend before you sit down for a listening session to put on a nice dress ,tights and some stiletto shoes , and a green wig. Will thrill it up a bit and make you feel naughty if you got caught.

Tobyjug, I find your post unnecessarily rude.

Dave is expressing his state of mind now that he's reached his upgrade target after 10 years of effort - what's wrong with that?

Claude