i dont believe in incremental upgrades. good way to waste money on side grades.

no need to dilly dally around moving from a $1000 speaker to a $1200 speaker (or dac or amp or whatever). make the jump to $5000 or $10000 (in value, not actual money spent) or save up until you can.

lets say you spent $500 on speakers 20 years ago. I think it’s a pretty stupid move to buy $500-700 speakers 20 years later. they probably are just different. not better.

can i afford to spend $10,000 on new speakers ? absolutely not. but I can stay on the lookout for insane deals on used gear. i can spend $800 on used speakers that cost $10,000 25 years ago and move up the ladder.

i love how my adcom 555 continues to work a solid 45 seconds after turning it off.

dac stays on. amp does not.

if i turned my dac off id have a much more intense startup procedure to avoid thumps and pops

gear being left on all the time is a thing in studio settings, but it’s typically reserved for certain items. Giant analog consoles stay on because the startup procedure is fairly intense. on our SSL4000’s back in the day, if the PSU went down from a power outage, there’s no guarantee it would start back up. same goes for the lexicon vintage digital reverbs. it was so finnicky. if you got it to boot fully functional, you left it on as long as possible. it’s full of obsolete digital chips that are un-replaceable. the only option is to pull a chip from another unit.

large voltage spikes can indeed put more wear on certain components and reduce their lifespan. but we are talking 45 years instead of 50 on a properly designed circuit.

Living Stereo advertisement - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVQ0mhxBuf4

the origins of stereo recording and the amazing audio advancements they made in the 50’s and 60’s are super interesting.

if you haven’t heard it, check out the wagner ring cycle recordings from the early 60’s with solti and the vienna philharmonic for early stereo awesomeness.

yt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDwCE13nyPo spotify - https://open.spotify.com/track/0Qz6v5BYL25uFJSt7HBs73?si=bb6f966208c646de

spend 5 minutes with an end game system and you realize how little the DAC matters.

i use top of the line converters at work, but also have a $15 toslink to rca DAC from amazon if i want to watch something on the TV using the TV’s built in streaming apps.

i can toggle between the top of the line converters and the $15 dac with the press of a button, everything else being exactly the same.

the biggest difference is the noisefloor at the ends or beginnings of songs. There are some weird artifacts with the crappy dac. The difference in quality of the actual sound is incredibly minute.

now if by source you mean the recording itself, then yes, i would mostly agree.

sometimes your ears just need to adjust. i’d try it a week and see what you think. you might like the extra midrange emphasis.

but the no-eq’d FR is not bad. it leaves the 200-1k range alone which is the most important for something sounding “natural”. the treble and bass boost is well within what an engineer might do to give something more presence

my only complaint is paul’s voice is a little prone to sibilance. he whistle’s his ess’s. it’s worse on S&G material.

graceland went a little ham on those fancy new digital reverbs

its still very, very good.

hearts and bones is probably his most “audiophile” grade recording IMO