Hi fi.

G

Grumpy2

Member
Anyone here get it?

Back in the day I was a bit of a hifi snob. More recently been seduced by the convenience of MP3 and Bose docking station streaming gizmos.

Visiting a friend recently he asked if I wanted a listen to his hifi. Blown away isn't in it! Not by volume but be detail, soundstage, drama and sheer delight in the quality of the presentation. Mind you his system cost in the region of £14k. Yes that's 14 of your thousand pounds sir!

It's been niggling at me ever since so today I visited my local hifi dealer enquiring about a £1500-2000 system. He's spent about two hours refusing to tell me the price of anything but letting me listen to music I thought I knew well. Pink floyd, Eagles, steely Dan and joe satraini. Wow! Wow wow! There's stuff going on I'd forgotten about and never heard before. It was like someone was opening my ears with every new thing I listened to.

Eventually I thought I'd settled on something for £2250. And I was happy.

BUT.

I made the mistake of asking what the Creek amp would sound like (only £900) compared to the arcam (£1500 including CD ). Oh My God.

That puts the budget up to £2700 with less functionality but a sound that has the hairs on edge just thinking about it.

Do I tell SWMBO.. just buy it and take the flack? Forget it and rejoice in the colour that is Bose?

£2700 is cheap for an auditory orgasm, but expensive for a month of cold shoulder.

Confused. Ta.
 
Ahh they wheeled out pink floyd and the Eagles, aye , Hotel California by chance?

Can I recommend if you can get hold of one a Sheffield Labs version of Speaking in Melodies, by Michael Ruff, it was always a firm favourite of ours when demonstrating a system we had just fitted when I was in the car audio game.

As for your home system DO IT you can't take the cash with you so you may as well enjoy it while you can :D

Stuart
 
The price of hifi does indeed go up exponentially.

And it's a very personal thing, just because I like fast attacking detailed sounds rather than rich and warm does not make me right or wrong.

You will also find that as you upgrade, the weakest link in your system becomes apparent.

I bought a pair of ATC SCM40 speakers together with a Perreaux amplifier. I also bought some second speaker cable at £300. It was great but then the Sonos was my weakest link by a country mile so a Cambridge Audio CXN was bought.

And so it goes on - speaker upgrade needed again now . . .

So, just enjoy what you have, and when you can, upgrade and enjoy some more.
 
The never ending spiral of the audiophile


I have done it all twice... Both over the period of 10 years a piece, it does get addictive..

Knowing when to stop and be happy is the key imho...

I ended up with an ASR/ DCS and manger line up...

But sold it all a few years ago.... Don't have anything as such now besides a Micro seiki turntable and some quad electrostatics..
 
Don't forget. All that detail can be quite tiring over long periods of listening.

I didn't realise Creek were still making stuff. The original stuff was always quite warm.

Many years ago I went for Naim boxes, all bought 2nd hand, pushing music through some B&W 705's. It's a very "friendly" sound that can be listened to for hours. Considering the front end is a CDX with it's own power supply, I often just hook up an iPod Touch for convenience. It's not as good as the CDX but still sounds pretty reasonable to me.
 
Go for it, if it's something you enjoy and will use for a long time then its a good investment. I'm into AV and recently spent £2k on a new projector, after a month it's money well spent.
 
It's definitely worth getting a good hifi, it transforms the music. But if you bought it without telling the other half, I don't think she would mind so much about the money as an entire wall of the house given over to some metal boxes and some bigger wooden ones and wires every where. That might be a sticking point!
 
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