Just Plain Finicky

No, not us.

Well, yeah, I guess we are finicky too… But this is about finicky audio systems.

I’ve heard a recent $200K system sound like my old $3K (Adcom / ADS / Toshiba first generation CD player) system when a different transport was introduced into it. Slow, atonal, washed out, muddy, etc.

I’ve heard a different but similar system brought to its knees with an unbroken-in powercord was introduced on the DAC. Bright, glaring, headache-inducing.

I could go on, and you know that I do, sometimes, do go on. But I will spare us.

So, what does this mean that highly tuned systems can be detuned so easily?

1. That systems are highly dependent on each and every piece of equipment and cabling to sound their most optimally very best

2. That there is some level of instability involved in system configuration

3. that system optimization may be quite similar to optimzations in other fields, that there are locally maximum configurations and that to get from one to the other one will likely be ‘detuning’ the system along the way. That similar to Simulated Annealing optimization techniques, many people more or less randomize their system configuration and then let it settle, after which they test to see if the system is better than it was before. Unfortunately, I think this ends up to more of a Random Walk for many people – who use faulty scoring to determine what ‘best’ is, as well as what to ‘heat up’ to get to the next better configuration. [For those of you in Math, Engineering, Operations Research or Computer Science – this will all be wonderfully illuminating, humorous, and not really very useful as far as I can tell… at least not right out of the box].

4. That many people (aka reviewers) who seem to put random pieces of unbroken in equipment in their system – and like it – have very strange and chaotic interpretations of ‘better’ [unless this peice of equipment is either WAY better than the piece it is replacing OR the piece it was replacing wasn’t broken-in either and theis new one just sounds bad in a different way that is Oh Such A Relief because the old one was driving them crazy].

OK, Summer is over. It is cold here (55 degrees F here Saturday afternoon). It is getting dark around 7:30-8:00. Time to go back inside with a good sack of CDs/LPs/?s. [AKA the Blog will get updated more often]