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by obmelvin
1972 days ago
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> However, if you're paying attention, you'll notice the flaws easily. At least you can tell yourself that your setup was worth the money because you can hear the difference ;) [comment meant to be mostly tongue in cheek - I agree with your comment] |
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Fortunately I didn't pay that much for my setup. Amp and speakers are about 30 years old and were given to me by my stepdad about 20 years ago. Pretty much everything else is second hand from eBay and 25 - 40 years old (CD player, tuner, tape, EQ).
The biggest expense is the subwoofer, which I did buy new because used prices for a decent subwoofer are still pretty high, especially when you factor in the cost of petrol to go and collect the thing (most people don't want to post because they weigh a lot).
The only other new components are an inexpensive Bluetooth 5.0 receiver, the speaker cable (Bassface, which I want to say was about £2/metre - super-cheap by audiophile standard) and gold-plated banana plugs from RS components. All the interconnects are I think Amazon Basics.
So my total expenditure for the whole system is less than £1,000. Fully half of that is the subwoofer. Admittedly, that's still probably a fair bit by most peoples' standards, especially when it's perfectly possible to get very good sound from a hifi separates system for £250 or so (see Techmoan's video series on the topic, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSY1iZqH118), but it's chickenfeed for most audiophiles. Still, I'm definitely not one of those guys: it sounds more than good enough to me and I've no desire to fall any further into that particular black hole.
Except for one thing... I don't have a turntable. So what I'm probably going to do is buy a pair of SL1210s and a mixer to plug in to the system. I'm lucky enough to have a fair number of 12" singles from a freecycle "barn find" type situation a few years ago, and another time-consuming hobby to get through the rest of this pandemic will be no bad thing.
There is both a danger and a satisfaction to mostly cobbling together a nice sounding system from lots of second-hand parts though. The temptation for me is to do the same again with one or two of the other rooms in the house.