Except for speakers, high end audio is a rip-off. I have a pair of B&W 201's.

See Slate, that's just the point. People who claim they care about "the fleshy skin of a bongo," are being pretentious.

Above a certain price point, I think that the systems are more about ego and looks than about price.

Face it, those 20k speakers, 10k monoblock amps and 6k speaker cables are worthless unless you have a dedicated listening room with extensive accoustic treatments.

For me, a set of midrange B&W speakers was fine. I have great sound and I didn't break the bank. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the higher end B&W's because my house has horrible acoustics (hardwood floors, etc).

they are definately worth it

i don't like subs very much. but some high quality speakers to replace your factory speakers is worth the investment to some. if i listen to crappy speakers for to long, it gives me a headache as my hearing is so sensitive i hear all the distortion and rattles that other people don't notice.

i replace the factory speakers on all my cars. i have kicker 4.25's in one, and alpine 6.5's in my other. crystal clear at high volumes, no need for an amp or subwoofers.

It must be awful to not be able to enjoy music unless you pay tens of thousands of dollars to hear it. Won't someone think of the poor audiophiles?

Forget the high end sound systems, get some high end headphones (Grado, Sennheiser, etc) and you'll have the same high quality sound at a fraction of the cost.

A good $200-$300 pair of headphones will match the audio quality of a 10k home stereo setup easily!

@Grimspoon:

From a pure physics point of view, this isn't true. There's no way that the small driver in the headphones can every reproduce the low frequencies in the music.

Headphones that boast 20-20k Hz frequency response are a joke. If you believe that, I have some Bose to sell you.

There's a difference between porn and sex?!

No highs? No lows? Must be Bose!

my home system is a bunch of homade speakers made with foil and paper plates. lol. although i did try that experiment, and, my speaker wouldn't play. damn youtube tricked me again. and btw, my t.v. didn't power off of a triple a, nor did my ipod charge off an onion.

That LPs or "well-recorded" CDs give you something extra is a myth. Besides, the MP3 holds the same data that the "well-recorded" CD imparted to it, so they are identical.

Quality costs money, but there is a point where the gains for the dollar eventually diminish.

I'll admit, I have about $5k invested in my own system - but this was spent over time and with careful research. I bought some of the gear secondhand which saved me even more. It can be amusing to invite folks over who blew $20k on some esoteric speakers nobody's ever heard of, only to have them leave feeling totally ripped off mere minutes into a movie or DVD-audio concert.

I would say the majority of the population doesn't give a shit about audio quality - at least not enough to spend the cash required to obtain quality components - and are perfectly happy with their $400 Sony Home-Theater-In-A-Box.

@SuffolkHouse:

False. Mp3 is a lossy format which means that the conversion from the original WAV file on the CD to mp3 implies 'throwing away' some of the original audio data.

@num1skeptic: So ya tried all those tricks, and your name is "Num1skeptic," huh?

@SuffolkHouse: The MP3 does not hold the same data, it's compressed and extreme high and lows are cut out. Not the same. Big difference.

Well, make sure you get some of those $800 Monster cables with neodymium-yttrium alloy plating.

@SuffolkHouse: If you want a lossless codec to encode your music to, and keep all the quality, Mp3 is not your ideal. Try FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) instead.

@GreatCaesarsGhost:

Or you could just be a cheap miser

Is it worth the price? It depends on whether or not you can hear the differences and you think the price of the quipment and media is justifiable. Some poeple just can't tell and think a BOSE Wave Radio sounds great others have golden ears that can pick apart even the finest equipment. I've been exposed to high-end audio equipment since I was born because my dad had all Marantz gear and Altec-Lansing speakers so I grew up with an appreciation for good sound quality.

I started putting together my first respectable system in my early 20's when I had a NAD preamp, Parasound amp, Sony DAT, Denon cd player and a pair of Carver Amazing speakers. I slowly kept upgrading components over the years and buying used helped me save a ton of money. The current components I have now I've owned for a few years: Parasound P/LD 2000 preamp, Parasound HCA 1200 II amps (2) and B&W Matrix 802 series 3 speakers (biamped). I've also got a Denon 3910 dvd player, an AKAI GX-77 reel to reel recorder, 3 DAT decks (Sony PCM-R300, Sony DTC-670, Fostex D-5) and a couple Sony Minidisc decks. I have a mix of Kimber Kable, Vampire Wire and Audioquest interconnects and I built my own speaker cables out of CAT5 wire following Chris VenHaus' design using 27 twisted pairs for the bottom half and 9 twisted pairs for the upper half. For the amount of money I have invested it sounds incredibly good. If I had bought everything new I wouldn't have been able to afford nearly as nice of equipment.

I started buying cd's at the age of 13 back in 1984 and have built up a collection of over 2600 cd's over that time. I spent a lot of money in the 90's on 24k gold remaster discs by labels like Mobile Fidelity, DCC, Sony/CBS Mastersound, Sheffield Lab, etc. and have over 300 of those gold discs, many of which are the definitive versions when it comes to sound quality. A couple years ago I broke down and bought a Denon dvd player to playback SACD, dvd-audio and DualDisc discs and I've got around 100 hi-res discs.

Between the components and all the cd's, SACD's dvd-audio discs, etc. I've got a lot of money wrapped up but unless the house burns down or it all gets stolen I'll have it for years to come. Some people blow more each year on alcohol or cigarettes or other dumb purchases so I feel I've spent my money somewhat wisely. It all boils down to what you enjoy and for me I enjoy great sounding music.

There WAS a time when this was improtant to me...

Now, I can't hear a damn thing above 13,000 Hz. So it really doesn't matter anymore. To many loud cars, guns, and rock concerts.

TEXASSCOUT, that's another good point. Many people, even younger kids, have abused their ears and are already suffering from hearing loss in the upper frequencies. Thankfully I had a little sense in my 20's and wore earplugs at my old job and whenever I was at the dragraces, firing guns, mowing the lawn, riding the motorcycle or anything else with high SPL for an extended amount of time. I'll be 37 in a few months and despite all the loud noise I've been around in my life I can still hear up to around 19,000hz which is pretty damn good for being a man (females have better high frequency hearing) and my age.

@ConsumptionJunkie: B&W FTW.

@RottNDude: $450 (Canadian) Yamaha Home Theater in a Box here.

That HTS has lasted me 2 years without a single problem. I just wish I had a second optical input, but otherwise, perfect.

And my computer has a set of 5.1's. Altec Lansing's with a dual woofer. Bought it on sale for less than $200. Two speakers stopped respoinding (the jacks on the base), so I used a PSP from Future Shop and got a new set, exactly the same.

Total spent on audio: Less than $1,000 after taxes AND product service plans.

Whatever works for you, works for you. Don't go disparaging my home theatre in a box and I won't laugh at your 20K sound system. The sad thing is that if you don't configure your room properly you won't get the full effect of any sound system.

If you listen to classical, jazz or maybe even the blues, then maybe higher quality speakers would be worth it. If you listen to Britney Spears, then you want the cheapest speakers you can find.

"The fleshy skin of a bongo." heh

*ahem* ANYWAY... most of us here in NYC aren't able to play music loud enough in our homes to appreciate or justify such an outlay on a sound system. So anyone who has one in their undoubtedly shoebox apartment is either wasting their money or is the most unpopular tenant in the building. Probably both, since these things tend to represent yet another big-fleshy-bongo substitute anyway. Hard, driving, thumping bass and all that.

Yeah, well I'm one of the folks who are skeptical about the pursuit of high-fidelity. Sure there is a relationship between quality and price but it is not a linear relationship. And then there's a point at which more quality may not make any difference in how you enjoy the product. And the fact that quality is an aggregate of multiple factors.

What I'd really like to see is someone conduct a rigorous blind study about these things:

1. Can professional audiophiles really tell the quality difference between super pricey audio systems and more reasonable ones?

2. Same as 1 but with regular folks.

I do believe that people can seriously fool themselves when evaluating the quality of their experience. If they know that the experience was delivered by a system which other people have already labeled "high quality" or by a pricey system, they adjust their evaluation accordingly irrespective of whether it was really more enjoyable than average to them.

Can the discerning ear hear a difference in high end systems? YES, much like a discerning ear can hear the difference between a Steinway and a Baldwin piano.

Is there a difference between a $200 and $1000 stereo system, YES.

Is there as difference between a $1000 Stereo system and a $10,000, Yes.

Is there a difference between a $10,000 and a $50,000 stereo system, yes; but a much smaller yes. In other words, as dollars go up the audio return on investment diminishes.

Some people are happy with something that makes musical noise; under $1000. (upright piano)

Others want a but more reality and depth to their music; $1000-10,000. (Balwin baby grand)

Others have a huge budget and an excellent ear; 10,000-50,000 (of course a dedicated music room to go along with it). (Steinway concert grand)

Then there are those who are bizarrely rich and and wipe their butts with $100 bills, over $50k (bosendorfer concert grand with an extra octave of bass notes)

Personally I can hear the difference in a 256kbs MP3 and a CD when compared AB. Mp3's require compression and compression results in loss.

I have listened to $100k systems in dedicated rooms with chairs bolted to the floor for best listening position and they are simply amazing. Three dimensional imaging and infinite depth to the sound. The draw back to these systems are - if you are not sitting at attention with your head facing forward you will lose all this dimension.

Ultimately an iPod does not equal Mark Levinson but an iPod is a lot easier to carry around. Ultimately, different tools for different needs.

@KillingMyBrainCells: If you listen to Britney Spears, you're probably reading PerezHilton, not the Consumersit :)

@lemur: Sure there is a relationship between quality and price but it is not a linear relationship.
----------------------------
It's called the law of diminishing returns and it applies to just about anything you can buy. A $100,000 car isn't going to be twice as fast as a $50,000 car. The same applies to audio equipment. A $10,000 pair of speakers isn't going to sound 5 times better than a $2,000 pair but to a lot of people the difference in price is money well spent because they can hear the difference.

It all depends on how much you like music. If I could afford it, I would totally spend that kind of money on the obligatory audiophile arsenal. But that is me. I think it is ludicrous to spend the amount of money they spend on sports (world series tix, superbowl, etc.). But I don't like sports. Not even a little.

At work we have $2k Mackie monitor speakers and they're really fantastic. The sign of good speakers is when you don't have to crank up the volume to hear everything in the music.

At home I've got a Klipsch 5.1 system that runs about $400 and does everything i want in a system for a room... any kind of music sounds great. One caveat about Klipsch 5.1's : their electronics heat up and will die after a year or so (learned the hard way). You can get modded ones off ebay (stpeteshepherd) that have fans inside them, but make a small noise.

Well, I don't know about price range or specific systems, but I have a Marantz Model 1060 with a pair of bose speakers and a record player. I didn't seek this out, my father gave it to me when he stopped listening to music(!?!).

Not too long ago I bought a record that I already had on MP3 because I like having the artwork and the physical object.

I was skeptical that playing it back from a record on a good set of speakers would make any significant difference from listening to it on my ipod with headphones. I just thought it would be a fun experiment.

I couldn't believe it! Of course, the songs were the same, the content was essentially identical, but there was a richness of depth and tone to the instruments that were just absent from the mp3 version. (We also tried playing the ipod through the marantz, rather than headphones, and got about the same quality as the headphones.)

Now, some jackass up by the top mentioned that anyone who cares about the "fleshy skin of a bongo" is just being pretentious, and it might feel that way to read it. But before you get too judgemental, keep in mind that's just a verbal attempt to recreate the feelings and sounds one experiences through a good stereo. It's one thing to read about, but it's something totally different to actually hear it first hand.

I don't know that I can hear the difference between a $500 stereo and a $20k stereo, but there is definitely a world of difference between Mp3 and vinyl. I can't discount the idea that there is a sound quality difference on a better system that can be a great experience.

They are absolutely worth it. My father was a big audiophile with cary tube preamps, krell monoblocks, some kind of expensive speakers and with a good quality recording, music sounds 3-dimensional.

@num1skeptic:
"my home system is a bunch of homade speakers"
Is that the nappy headed kind?

My audio systems over the years have run the from high end Marantz to low end RCA with everything in between. Right now everything in my home theater system is Denon, with the exception of the Panasonic Plasma, and the Polk Audio speakers. Overall however I'm in the same boat as @TexasScout: I can't hear anything in the high range anymore

@AfterimageB:

A $10,000 pair of speakers isn't going to sound 5 times better than a $2,000 pair but to a lot of people the difference in price is money well spent because they can hear the difference.

That's the kind of statement I'd like to see proved by a blind study. The fact that there exist people who will say that their $10,000 pair of speakers has a better sound quality than a $2,000 pair does not prove that they can in fact hear a difference in quality between the $10,000 pair and the $2,000 one. Somebody who's paid $10,000 for speakers will not admit that they could have obtained the same quality for $2,000 because that would amount to saying "hey, I've just wasted $8,000".

I prefer high-end sound systems, they sound better, they look better and the quality of the equipment is much better. It's a lot like the article. Wine is wine is a 10$ bottle better than a 200$ bottle, oil painting vs poster, they all do the same thing, just depends on your level of quality.

Since we both have some minor to moderate hearing damage I would think that anything over a mid range in quality sound system is just going to be wasted.

I just want a way to auto-mute or sound adjust TV commercials. The audio they do on most of them is just obnoxious.

I think what the price difference illustrates as much as anything is how artificially-priced the low-end equipment is. A $400 dollar All-In-One was probably assembled in a 3rd world country on an assembly line and likely contains numerous flaws in casing and wiring which would lead to distorted audio. A $2000 speaker is much more likely to have been made by hand, quality tested, and (gasp) have customer support. If it doesn't offer those things for the higher price, then yeah, it's an ego piece for overly wealthy hipsters, but none of those read this stuff right?

beauty is in the eye of the beholder. same with music, only with ears. absolutely some have better ears than other. no arguing that. but weather more bass or more treble or more mid sounds better?, it depends on what you prefer. i prefer more bass but it all varies on the style of music you like. i like rock. but if i was listening to jazz or classical, i'd change my eq. but none of that matters if your speakers suck. you have to have a quality head unit, wires, and speakers.

btw, i have a much better system in my car than home, because i live in an apartment and can't turn it up loud anyhow. but i don't belive in sub-woofers. just high quality speakers to replace the crappy factory ones.

Let's compare apples to apples.

First of all, any discussion of audiophilia cannot contain any mention of MP3.

And dismissing the superiority of vinyl over CD isn't fair unless it's determined whether either has been compressed (most mass-market CDs are compressed to death, but most vinyl isn't. However, there are exceptions to both).

There has already been adequate coverage here about speakers, players, and amps. But they do need to be well-matched. A weak link in a good system could very well sound worse than a well-matched mediocre system.

A good $1000 will get you 95% of the way there, but from there on the price difference is geometric for each additional percentage point.

If you doubt any of this, just go to any elite sound store (most larger cities have at least one) and go into their top-end listening room and sit in the center chair. A good system can make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and not from air movement.

As in appreciating anything, the more experience you have about a subject the greater your range of appreciation. I once worked for a chef who correctly identified 20 high-end bottled waters while blindfolded.

There really does exist a difference between high end and low end equipment. The biggest problem that consumers experience when dealing with high end equipment is what I like to call "Bose syndrome". Since Bose advertises a huge amount yet producing thoroughly substandard equipment for the price, I think a large amount of fallout comes from the lack of results that such products provide. These purported high end audio companies produce terrible products and blacken the whole industry. The 7000 dollars/foot digital cable industry is a black mark on audiophiles all around.
If you really want to get proof that equipment quality matters and price is reasonable, focus on headphones. A decent headphone setup can run 1/10 of the price of a comparable speaker setup. Granted, you do make sacrifices with headphones, but, the price difference makes it far easier to approach. I have not met a person who did not say "Wow" after listening to FLAC (a lossless audio file that creates a duplicate of the CD track, unlike the MP3 format) through my setup. A Bel Canto DAC and a nice homebuilt PPA amp with very moderately priced reference headphones like the Sennheiser HD650 or Beyerdynamic DT770 produces amazing results. Based on my experiences in forcing anyone I can at college to listen to my setup, I can say with satisfaction that it is not a placebo.
Ignorance is the biggest enemy to the idea of audiophilia. People who pay 400 dollars on a new iPod do not want to know that is possesses a substandard DAC and amplifier. Likewise, people assume that expense equals quality (Hence the white iPod earbud/Bose issues) when quality can be found at great savings.

For those of you who want to try the difference between mostly-audiophile and your iPods, but - like me - aren't going to blow the cheddar on something that might be made up, try this: build your own speakers. It's seriously a lot easier than you think. Forget the high-end for now: go look for some full-range drivers by Tang Band, and look for designs for speakers called "Tuned Quarter-Wave Pipe." For the amp, you can buy a totally cheesy $30 T-amp made by Sonic Impact, or get a much better version for about $120 from diyaudio.com (which is some totally cracked out dude in Malaysia who makes souped-up ones himself, and names them after Charlize Theron).

The T-amps make tube-amp owners cry: they sound better than most anything under $2k. Same goes for the speakers. I have NO experience with carpentry, and the speaker cabinets look like something a retarded middle schooler made in shop. But MAN. I spent probably $400 for the whole thing, including buying the power tools, and solid oak for the cabinets, and the system beats out stereos costing ten times that much. Absolutely worth it. Partsexpress.com sells most of the stuff you need, and has tutorials.

Oh, and I agree with whoever busted on CDs. I bought a super-audio CD on a lark, and you can absolutely hear the difference. CDs are all compressed to hell, and sound brittle on a good system. Haven't tried vinyl, 'cause I'm skeptical. And I'm not a shill for any of those websites.

if the amp doesn't go to 11 i don't want it

I can barely hear the difference between 1000 speakers and my earphones. I guess I'm just a barbarian.

$1000 speakers that is.

@Tank:
You win the thread