2 ms·
It's funny, but I'd offer just the opposite advice these days. Most people don't spend enough on their speakers, both in terms of cost and in terms of devoting
by beloch 11y ago
It's funny, but I'd offer just the opposite advice these days. Most people don't spend enough on their speakers, both in terms of cost and in terms of devoting the space and time to set them up properly.
The amount of money you should spend on your source as compared to the rest of your gear has just kept going steadily downwards. Back in the vinyl days you really had to spend a mint to get a good record player, and it didn't hurt to keep buying copies of records that got a lot of play. Spending even more would net you concrete reductions in noise, less wear on your records, etc.. These days S/PDIF out from an the on-board audio chipset of a motherboard and a decent receiver/pre-amp or DAC are overkill for 99.9% of the sound systems out there. High end CD transports are pure snake-oil.
- ksk 11y agoAh, I meant upgrading source as in making sure you have a high quality mp3/flac/etc to begin with. I was assuming that most people are not listening directly from CD and a significant amount of audio files out there are still of crappy quality.
- beloch 11y agoDo a blind ABX test of files made using popular compression settings vs FLAC or other lossless files. You may be surprised at how good low bitrates can be these days. Obviously, if you care you're going to insist on lossless, but mastering problems (e.g. the loudness wars) are a much bigger culprit of poor audio quality these days.