cmarin, yes, I understand what you are saying. I was reacting to what on its face is a fairly radical comment, especially in a review, about defeating the law of diminishing returns. I was startled and did not comment further at the time. Having thought about it a bit more, I can share some thoughts.
I used to think of the notion of diminishing returns as a common experience most people have when they are on the merry go round always upgrading to the next best thing and accepting small incremental improvements in overall sound quality and experience. This is one aspect that drives the industry: the promise for incremental improvement through changes and upgrades. It comes with major purchases like new SOTA speakers, sources, or monster amps. It also comes from new cable looms, a power cord, sets of footers, racks, power conditioners, and cartridges. I remember reading poetry about tonearm wiring and headshell interfaces. Everything made a difference, and the more developed the system, the more easily these differences could be heard. Great stuff for forum threads, especially with nice photos.
I experienced something similar but from doing the opposite. Rather than continuing to buy new stuff, I experimented with set up and learned by listening to the effect of small changes. I began removing things from the system and room and hearing improvements. I replaced supports, cords, and outlets with common, industrial alternatives. The more I removed, the greater the improvements became. Simplification became an approach as I focused on set up for the biggest gains. Of course, what I heard was predicated in large part on the major components I kept. In one sense, this would be even more radical to read in a review because it goes against the conventional wisdom. Then having gone as far as I thought I could, I stopped. I then changed direction completely.
Reading this comment from Mr. Gregory was refreshing. He is talking about a very expensive amplifier. He goes on to recommend two of them in mono mode. I am glad he thinks that such a purchase would shatter the conventional notion of small incremental improvements. I would hope that such a change should bring about a monumental shift in the appreciation of one's system.
I am now hearing changes with cartridge selections and tonearm fine tuning that were inaudible before. These are so simple and so gratifying that I am no longer considering big purchases. I now only think about new things I will discover from listening to music. A diminishing return is the last thing I want from a big purchase. It should be something much more. I think Mr. Gregory hits on something very important. It is a kind of shift in how to think about what you get out of a purchase, a new way of looking at things. I think of Jeff Day's wonderful essay about the Expanding Listing Window in a similar way.
I love the music-motivating enthusiasm and hobby-istic romance of the geometric or quantum leap in sound quality concept. I am just skeptical that upon careful, introspective and sober analysis the sonic improvement is not actually linear.
I would like to be wrong, and you to be correct!
Hi Ron, Peter and Mike,
“after sober introspection and sober analysis” - what’s that!?
I think we’ve all experienced changes to our system where it was hard to detect whether it was indeed an improvement or not, and we neeeded additional time to determine if it was in fact real.
And we’re all familiar with the concept of diminishing returns applied to audio where incremental expenditures/effort produce less (not linear) improvement in the quality of the sound reproduction (however you choose to measure it) than the previous equal expenditure/effort.
The increments that I’m talking about are not diminishing or difficult to discern. We can’t really use the word linear or exponential to describe the increment because that assumes a quantifiable scale for musical enjoyment which we don’t have. Perhaps a better term is order of magnitude change or as Mike L put it “a transcendent experience”.
Is the perceived change real? I think it’s as real as any subjective experience can be, given that we can’t agree how to describe it or much less measure it.
But I can tell you the change was not minor. It was an order of magnitude change. It felt real to me in terms of how closer it felt to a live musical event experience than in my room before. And the changes were experienced with similar astonishment by two other persons who are familiar with my system. One of them in particular said vehemently: “do not change anything again, Please!!”
These are the kind of non-diminishing returns that I imagine Mike L mentioned and experienced when listening and deciding to acquire the Wadax.
Will the effect last past the passage of time and sober analysis? And will that make it real?
What little I know is that emotional response to a stimuli will decrease over time as the receptors become sensitized to the stimuli.
Just like falling in love or hearing a fantastic piece of music for the first time, or listening to your system reach a new level of emotional engagement, the shine will fade somewhat over time. Not necessarily because you were fooled by it, but because it’s a natural biological reaction. So will that make the first reaction less real?
In any case, we can can continue to debate these issues, and not necessarily agree in the end.
But what I do know, other than knowing I don’t know anything, is that the returns of investments/effort in audio do not have to be diminishing. They can be linear or greater than linear. Or as Mike L put it: “a tiny objective difference (or a group of super tiny differences) that causes a world of perceptive change”
And whether the CH Precision components will result in incremental improvement or greater than linear improvements, is not the reason I quoted the review.
The reason I quoted the review by Mr. Gregory, was the language used by Stirling and the reviewer, expands on the traditional audiophile jargon that misses the point that the purpose of listening is how it makes you feel, and why it makes you feel that way.
Which brings me to the idea presented by Stirling: our brain focuses on differences, so artifacts in the reproduction of music distract our brain away from the emotional side to the analytical side which disconnects us from the level of suspension of disbelief and enjoyment of the music.
So components that lower the noise/artifact levels sufficiently to new depths, like the Wadax and others, allow the right side of our brains to melt into the music with the emotional side of our brain fully engaged, without interruption by our analytical side.
And it is those kind of components that can create non-diminishing returns.
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