System Upgrades That Make Real Improvements

You just received a wonderful new component for your audio system. Inserting it into your system you notice, after the initial excitement wears off, that you begin to hear things that sound not exactly as they did in the store you (or your loving spouse) bought it from. What gives? Was there some magic happening in the store, some trick? Unlikely, but stores tend to outfit their systems with a variety of good supportive products and accessories that can make an important improvement to the overall system’s performance.

True Improvement:

An important note to remember whenever assessing a change in one’s system; it is only when a change results in seemingly incompatible improvements that true improvement is being experienced. By that, I mean that changes resulting from elevations or reductions in specific areas of musical reproduction are usually cheap parlor tricks. For example, a cable that increases energy in the low treble region will often be experienced by those inexperienced in global system assessment as sounding “clearer” or having “more detail”. Of course it sounds this way, you’ve inserted an equalizer into your system, not a component that results in the passage of more information. Rather it is selectively altering sound you are hearing.