For 40 years I’ve been buying and selling hi-fi equipment, each time striving to improve and get closer to my musical holy grail… but after a while I realized something was still missing… except that for the last two years since I got my current equipment, I haven’t questioned it anymore, I just listen to music and I find the sound excellent, at least to my taste! Long may it last!
Because ultimately it’s nice not to want to change systems anymore…
And you? Where are you at with this?
Congratulations! Music is what it is all about. More piece of mind when you reach a stage where your stop thinking about your system and just enjoy the music.
That’s because you’ve got ATC’s active 40s!
Roger
Maybe… SPL is excellent too! I should mention that I started buying hi-fi equipment at the age of 14…
That’s so true… 
I believe the most important thing is the homogeneity of the system, both in terms of value and musicality, as well as the connection with the listening room… it’s so difficult to achieve!
Beyond a certain quality level all modern gear is pretty good.
The SPL Phonitor, is at the top of the headphone amp pile I believe, and matched with good headphones is pretty good. But I enjoy my bedroom HP setup which is a Lehmann Audio Drachenfels and a cheap Bluesound Nano Node. The difference is not enough to worry about.
Finding brilliant new music is a much better quest. A good album will make fretting about gear disappear.
In my first first 5 years of hifi I was all too well aware of limitations, despite it sounding good - good being relative to anything I’d heard at home or in other people’s houses. But once Id gone through the first upgrades to having excellent speakers and pretty good source, during most of the next 5 decades to today I didn’t at all feel anything was missing, though I knew that better was possible which is what drove subsequent upgrades towards the nirvanas where I stopped until equipment failure, and advent of streaming, created desire/need to change.
I agree, avoiding the ridiculous and expensive silliness and enjoying the music is the way to happiness.
Did mummy and daddy give you a lot of pocket money?
I have reached this stage at last!
It was the DBL’s and 500 series electronics that got me there.
I no longer listen to the music I am engulfed by it.
In fact, I’m not the one who was bought, but my family joined together to buy me an AKAI hi-fi system, knowing that I already listened to a lot of music… it’s the beginning of the 1980s.
Since then I have been more and more passionate about sound and equipment and I have not stopped buying and selling… until recently!
I imagine with this system…
Odd question. Whilst we don’t know what the OP first bought, starting equipment is not necessarily very expensive, whether secondhand, or perhaps DIY, or modular components as I did when I started assembling my first system, completed shortly after my 15th birthday. My own funding was paper rounds, 2 1/2 a day (one morning and one evening plus second morning shared with my brother), plus money instead of gifts for 2 birthdays and Christmas, together with pocket money which wasn’t large but spent on almost very little else for a year as I was serious about saving for my first hifi, managing to save £68.
I got paid £50 a week for my full-time job in 1980 when I was 16 and used it to buy concert tickets, beer, and secondhand Hifi components that I bought from the Solihull News classified section.
A Rotel turntable, a Marantz tuner, a Technics cassette player, and a Technics integrated amp, and largefloor standing three-way KEF speakers.
I also bought a stack of 10 cymbals purely by chance… I was walking past Woodruff’s musical instrument shop in Birmingham City Centre one day, and the shop was closing down, and I walked in and bought them on spec.
It turned out that although they needed polishing several of them were made by Zildjian and I sold the ones I didn’t use myself which helped me to upgrade my Hifi and drum kit.
I must admit that in those days I was more interested in volume than the nuances of sound quality!
My first full time job in 1971 paid £10.50 pw before NI & tax (I don’t recall how much any deductions were). Within my first year of work I bought a Thorens TD150 TT, (IIRC ~£50) and Shure M75E cartridge (~£20), plus lots of records!
I enjoyed music on a variety of systems from before 10 years old when I used to play records on my sister’s mono record player which had a valve amp. (1960’s). My first real hi-fi was at around 15. But it was when I got a Linn LP12 turntable when I was 18 that things really changed. Suddenly I was no longer listening to hi-fi, I was listening to real music. It was a fundamental and obvious difference and improvement. It changed my whole relationship with recorded music. It really was that powerful and it’s impossible to over state it.
Since then I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed the various Linn/Naim systems that I owned for many years. But I always still had the desire to get something even better - the next step up. It’s only now, with our current system, that I don’t feel any particular need to improve anything. I’m sure that it’s down to our Klipsch horn loaded speakers which are incredibly musical and give a remarkably vivid impression of being sat right in front of live musicians. More so than any other speaker I’ve ever heard, except many years ago when I heard active SBL’s driven by a top Linn/Naim system. Given that our electronics are really quite modest by high-end standards this is quite an achievement for the Klipsch speakers. The SBL’s needed mega bucks of system up them to achieve a similar result.
I’m well aware that improvements are possible but I no longer feel any particular need to pursue them. It’s the first time in my whole audio experience that I can honestly say I’ve felt this way. So I guess in some sense I’ve arrived at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s taken more than half a century to get here, but better late than never.
I’m there too, I feel. First family ‘system’ I heard was an old English Electric valve gramophone with auto changer. Sounded pretty good to a 10 year old ! My own first system was a Philips music centre bought from Comet in the days when it was a basic cash-and-carry (I toyed around with going for quadraphonic but in the end didn’t). Then my student Dual/Pioneer/JVC/Mission separates system and then the first audiophile system with Axis, Naim 32 etc. and the Missions. Finally to my LP12/CD555/552/500/DR Dynaudio nirvana. Each of these systems has given huge enjoyment and that journey has taken half a century too.
Yes I agree, but some can only enjoy the music once they’ve got to a certain level.
Unless of course they just want to indicate how much they’ve spent on their hi-fi 
I’m getting there. I’ve had the same wonderful floorstanding speakers for nearly 30 years (Athena Technologies AS-F2 from Canada), which I might consider replacing in a couple of years. My main source through convenience (i.e. laziness) is a Naim Uniti Core, to which I recently added a 8TB SSD when I was close to filling my 4TB drive. The sound, from CDs ripped years ago to recent hi-res downloads, is exemplary.
My VPI turntable, Lyra Delos cart, PS Audio DAC and SACD transport, Parasound phono & power amps, and Schiit preamp are so close to my dream system. Cable upgrades have been my only vice lately.
Nice system! Why change the speakers if you find them excellent?
I don’t even plan to replace the cables… I tried quite a few and the ones I have now (Wireworld) finalize my system in a beautiful way to form a coherent and homogeneous whole.
We’re hoping to move to a new home this year or next, and my current speakers may not fit in with a different listening environment. Then again, they just might. It should prove interesting.
