Expensive equipment, help me understand.

john_smith

john_smith

john_smith

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I ended up going dow a rabbit hole looking at expensive equipment on eBay.

These amps are 22k+ new

www.ebay.co.uk

Chord SPM 6000 Mk 2 Reference Mono Poweramp Pair RRP £22,500 Exceptional Sound | eBay UK

Along with its 14000 stablemate, the SPM 6000 MkII is one of the largest mono amplifiers we have ever built and its performance is spectacular. Chord SPM 6000 Mk - 750 W per mono Block into 8 Ohm - and 1500 W into 4 Ohm.
www.ebay.co.uk

These speakers are 35k+


Would spending £55k on those be beneficial? Where do you draw the line? Surely there's a level of expense where you can't notice the difference above?

Edit, no idea why the speakers link has renamed.
 
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yeah there is a line and depends on age and hearing. Room as well little point having that gear in a room where it's all tile and glass./

My stuff isn't close to Chord gear or those speakers but it's pretty good. And to get better would be Anthem, Monoprice, Trinnov, Storm, and speakers in £10,000+ for a pair, which I'm not going to spend.

And depends on your earnings if you are minimum wage part time, then £70,000 on a stereo is nuts. But if you get £70,000 a week...then sure why not lol

Those amps are 10 years ago now, if you were serious I'd probably want to get them serviced by now
 
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There's a market for ultra high-end, ultra expensive hi-fi equipment, so obviously some people see the benefit.

If you are mega-wealthy, then £35k isn't a lot of money to you, so if your favourite hobby is listening to music, then it can make sense to you, and is no different to buying a supercar or a superyacht really. If you get what you wanted, then it's all good.
 
Some of this stuff is expensive because it can be - not necessarily because it delivers significantly better performance, etc.

Though the engineering behind some of it comes at a cost even when it technically doesn't delivery hugely different performance by ear.

Some of the Chord stuff you can DIY build for like £100 in parts and get close enough to the performance if you've a basic electronics engineering grounding.
 
Rroff said:
Some of this stuff is expensive because it can be - not necessarily because it delivers significantly better performance, etc.

Though the engineering behind some of it comes at a cost even when it technically doesn't delivery hugely different performance by ear.

Some of the Chord stuff you can DIY build for like £100 in parts and get close enough to the performance if you've a basic electronics engineering grounding.
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watching GR research is interesting, some high speakers speakers and still using basic crossovers cheap components little better than £200 budget speakers
 
hornetstinger said:
still using basic crossovers cheap components little better than £200 budget speakers
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Hugely contentious one - for example a lot of well regarded electronics engineers will swear blind by Rubycon capacitors (perfectly adequate, highly cost effective) because of their mindset - because you spend a fortune on boutique capacitors to get like a less than 1% improvement and that makes no sense to their engineering rationale - but personally if I'm spending over the odds on fancy audio equipment I want those fancy capacitors even if they aren't going to make huge odds.
 
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There will always be diminishing returns beyond a certain point, but for audiophiles with disposable income, as with any hobby it's about that last 1%.

Edit:\ Before you get to that level of equipment it would generally be considered necessary to have a dedicated listening room that is set up perfectly and has been sound treated.
 
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john_smith said:
I ended up going dow a rabbit hole looking at expensive equipment on eBay.

These amps are 22k+ new

www.ebay.co.uk

Chord SPM 6000 Mk 2 Reference Mono Poweramp Pair RRP £22,500 Exceptional Sound | eBay UK

Along with its 14000 stablemate, the SPM 6000 MkII is one of the largest mono amplifiers we have ever built and its performance is spectacular. Chord SPM 6000 Mk - 750 W per mono Block into 8 Ohm - and 1500 W into 4 Ohm.
www.ebay.co.uk

These speakers are 35k+


Would spending £55k on those be beneficial? Where do you draw the line? Surely there's a level of expense where you can't notice the difference above?

Edit, no idea why the speakers link has renamed.
Click to expand...

Depends where you're standing.

If you are invested in the hobby of playing vinyl then audio fidelity is already not the top priority. Instead the top priority is attempting to fix the problems caused by listening to audio played through vinyl or at least making the distortion pleasing to the listener.

After all, if you wanted the most accurate music you'd start by playing the digital track the vinyl was made from.
 
Every niche has a hardcore of silly people willing to spend silly money on imaginary gains (and the smart people willing to supply). Audiophilia is probably the silliest.
 
I work in the watch industry and some folks making £100k a year easily spend £20k+ on a watch or new watches...
 
Some thoughts, mostly already covered:
- some people have not just the cash, but the interest, passion, whatever you wish to call it, as it’s their hobby. Not really any different to spending your free dosh on a model RC aircraft, M3, Rolex etc. I’ve met people who live in an extremely mundane 2 bedroom town house, with systems costing well into 4 figures
- it’s easy to be dismissive of something that you’ve not experienced. I’ve heard systems costing well into into 6 figures, and most of them really were awesome. Comments of “diminishing returns” is a bit of a misnomer. My belief is that a better way to describe it would be that every decent noticeable improvement costs twice as much. Keep that up and those exponential costs very quickly get silly.
- interesting comment about vinyl being produced from a digital source. Agreed. It does seem rather counterintuitive. Having said that, serious vinyl users probably already have hundreds or thousands of records cut prior to digital recording being ubiquitous. There’s also the point about how good some of the serious decks are that now exist. I’d still put vinyl as being the current best sounding format (for analogue
recordings), and that’s despite having not owned a record deck in 30 years
 
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Same with any hobby, but hifi is really the OG when it comes to a rabbit hole industry where people with money will chase every last gain, real or imagined, and the industry in turn creates products to serve these appetites.

Buying new gear becomes the actual hobby rather than listening to music, (much like photography forums are *always* mostly about buying gear rather than taking photos).

Buy what makes you happy! Each to their own.

I paid £500 for a used Naim Nait 5i2 and CD5i2, paired with my Falcon Acoustics IMF100 and used Thorens TD160 mk2…..I’m comfortably at my ‘value’ sweet spot. I’d have to spend a big wedge of cash to get marginal gains at this point.

I enjoy listening to music on my setup, which is the only thing that matters at the end of the day.
 
Every year I go the North West Audio show, it's quite common to see £100k+ systems there. Normally those systems sound incredibly good, but occasionally an expensive system won't sound correct but that's normally a setup issue that the exhibitor will resolve by the second day.

You get very much into law of diminishing returns. I have a Technics 1200G, retail £4k but found £3.5k. The big upgrade is the Technics 1000R sells around £19k, but it won't be 4-5x better then the 1200G. If money was not an issue I would still buy the 1000R.
 
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It's the same as any market really. Always diminishing returns as you go more and more extreme. That said there's always people to pay more and be more niche/exclusive.

Different strokes for different folks really, and for those with special interests and wanting to buy all the audio gear and know all the variances and nuances that's fine too if that's their passion. I'm definitely more value driven though as an individual, but even that is perception at end of day.

You want iPhone? Great. You're not happy with iPhone? Get a vertu or something etc etc.
 
What's great is if you love music it kinda doesn't matter how flashy your system is. My student hifi was an £80 Yamaha amp, Dual 505 record deck (£90) and 100 quid monitor audios, but i loved it. Even that is a big step up from most bluetooth speakers today.
My local record shop in Bournemouth when I was a teen had a knackered 60s looking american all-in-one box that sounded so cool but defo not hifi.
 
monkentage said:
Every niche has a hardcore of silly people willing to spend silly money on imaginary gains (and the smart people willing to supply). Audiophilia is probably the silliest.
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I don't think they are silly, some would be musicians, composers, song writers, producers whose livelyhood depends on a great sounding system.
The more you spend, the better it sounds!
 
CorrectHorseBattery said:
I think people convince themselves they can hear a difference but they actually can’t.
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And some people come to the conclusion that a soundbar is as good as a decent separates system, either because of waf, decor or inability to afford decent gear.

Don't need to go high end to get good gear either I'd say couple of grand gets you a decent audio system, although the more channels you want the more I'd spend to keep the quality.

I'd rather have a £1500 5.1 system than a £1500 7.2.4 system
 
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