Listening to other’s systems is one of life’s great joys. It’s been fun to hear and learn about Magico M3s, A5s, and Gryphon Kodos at my friends’ homes.
One of the bits of advice I give younger people is that “no one has everything figured out”. “Best to learn by experiencing a wide variety of viewpoints.”
In audio, that translates into experimenting and keeping an open mind. Don’t believe in audiophile ethernet cables or ethernet switches? Fine, but borrow some and see if you hear differences.
Great post, Lee. Yes, listening to other systems is fun and an important learning experience. Without regularly listening to friends' systems I would never have gotten to where I am now with my own system.
If you are working just on your own, it's easy to delude yourself and think at some point this sounds fantastic, when it really does not. Listening to other systems, and having others critically assessing yours, on a regular basis reveals what is possible and what you can strive for. And then you may actually arrive at a, for your taste, relatively fantastic sound, even though better is always possible and any sound, regardless at what level of quality, is always a compromise (for starters, any speaker position in a room, even that of the most expensive ones, is a compromise between competing parameters).
In my view, for a proper learning experience it is useful or even necessary to have a strong sense of your own listening priorities and what you want to achieve with your own system. Otherwise listening to other systems may be disorienting, leaving you waving in the wind by wanting it all. Again, everything is a compromise (also those other systems), and you need to find out which advances you can make in your own system based upon learning exposure to others, *without* sacrificing any of your own highly personal listening priorities that you should be firmly aware of, but with still allowing more compromises elsewhere.
And yes, you learn when you keep an open mind. Even though you think you are openminded, you may not really be, or not sufficiently. Speaking for myself, I have resisted some ideas about power, amplification and other things for a long time, until finally the evidence repeatedly heard in others' systems, or presented to me in my own system, broke down my resistance that had been based on faulty (technical or otherwise) thinking. My now more than a decade long strong, and I would contend, vital, interest in room acoustics started when I heard a friends' rather moderate but musical system after it had moved to another room where it just sounded so much better.
Another thing that I would suggest: It is good to listen to experts or perhaps even consult them in person for your setup and room, but never take an expert's opinion as the last word (every expert is biased with in some ways flawed opinions, that's human nature, and no one is a "god" no matter what their experience or credentials). Remain highly skeptical and keep experimenting and find out what best suits *you* and *your* individual perceptions and taste.
That I guess plays into what you said, Lee:
“no one has everything figured out”. “Best to learn by experiencing a wide variety of viewpoints.”
