In fact, the cost is records - buying them, cleaning them, managing them and set-up. Unless you can buy the whole matched analog rig, you might have "discovery" costs till you hit the right combo.
My reply to this post from another thread:
"Discovery" costs till you hit the right combo: that brings up an interesting point. From reading about the turnover of gear that people have gone through, it seems to me that many or even most people have gone through multiples of the cost of their current gear before they arrived at that gear (of course, they might have had very favorable buy/sale conditions that alleviated the financial burden, but that is a different matter).
For me it's a different story: I have calculated that my current gear/room treatment amounts to about 60 % of all the money I have spent on gear in my entire audiophile life. I still have a 25-year old power conditioner and 23-year old interconnects/speaker cables. My amp is also the original one from 25 years ago, but heavily modified and supplemented with external power supplies. My speakers were also 24 years old until I exchanged them for new ones last year, which were less than half of the price of those old speakers, but outperform them significantly.
I guess to each their own version of the hobby: some seem to enjoy to go through gear just for the fun of change, or because they are always interested in the latest versions of their favorite kinds of gear. Or they simply enjoy for its own sake the process of upgrading gear. I don't enjoy any of these things the way others do. I just want music reproduction that is exciting and involving to me.
Some also chase for all kinds of new things because they don't have clear ideas about their personal preferences in music reproduction and "want it all", which is impossible -- every system, even the most expensive one, is by definition a compromise (heck, even each speaker positioning is a compromise!). Knowing your priorities -- those things you cannot live without versus those that are desirable but of lesser subjective importance, even though you might admire them in other systems -- goes a long way in avoiding false starts and blind alleys.
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What do you think? What makes you tick as an audiophile, and what is this hobby about for you?
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