Is "better" equipment always ... better?

[MurphyNut]

Over the years I've spent a reasonable amount of my hard earned cash on audio equipment. And it's kept me happy knowing I must have a better than average set up to listen to my classical music.
I then got into ipods and decided that I fancied my music from time to time being more portable rather than confined to the Hi-Fi setup in the living room. I bought a dock to plug my ipod into. This wasn't an expensive one but I was amazed at how good it sounded.
A few years on all the Hi-Fi is gone and I've upgraded that dock with a more expensive one. I now have sound quality that is more natural, less coloured and more pleasing to my ear than any of those more pricey setups I've had in the past.
All out of a plastic case not much bigger than a shoe box, speaker technology has moved on quite a bit in recent years.

[GrimJosef]

In the end music systems are trying to create the illusion, in our heads, of the original musicians being 'there' with us (let's just park the question of what this means when the musician is a teenager programming a computer-based synthesiser in his/her bedroom). Our heads are all different. For me the most effective way of creating that illusion is with a well-recorded CD or digital file (like the lossless ones in your iPod), converted to analog in a good DAC, fed through a transparent amplifier to a pair of really good quality and properly positioned speakers. I've sat in front of a pair of 60 year old speakers (Quad ESL57s as they've come to be known), shut my eyes, and had the Allegri string quartet in front of me.

Cheers,

GJ

[IanBland]

I don't know if necessarily the intention is an illusion of reality, at least not for all music. My tastes run to rock, psychedelic and electronica of divers kinds and all of this is produced track by track in a studio and then artificial effects added to it. There is nothing natural to recreate. Maybe that is why I've always been less concerned with fidelity (to reality).

[russell_w_b]

I can understand the difference in price if the high-end stuff has been hand-assembled, hand checked and tested individually, especially in countries where labour costs are higher, and each unit produced is made accountable, in the event of fault, to a specific person or team.

What annoys me is the illusion created and upon which advertising is based (watch analogy again - they're dreadful for it) that such goods have been individually manufactured by Swiss elves working away in a little hut in a forest with locally-mined gold and jewels ground by hand-maidens when the reality is that they're churned out by CNC machinery on an industrial estate in Shenzen with barely a human eye giving them the once-over.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with how things are made mass-produced as described. What is wrong is that it's almost fraudulent in that the advertising attempts to portray the second scenario as the first and the manufacturers charge accordingly. And folks still fall for it!