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The fact that cost in audio does not mean sound quality knows everyone and everyone, particularly whose sell expensive audio, love to pitch it. However, we all understand the cost/sound misbalance but we very seldom take it personally. 

At my site I try to keep cost of audio out of logical language and if I use cost then only as a tool of topological application – like this it that solution is not rational for this or that cost. The method is accurate in my view but it also serves a subliminal purpose associating price with result. So, I asked myself why do not accept the premise of the implication and do not take price of audio very personally. If we drop the fear of associating price with quality and will use ONLY price without any fear then some very interesting horizons will open for us.

The punch to think this way gave me a recent visit of a local friend of my mine. He is not an audio friend, he is a regular civilian who do not know about audio too much. He listened my playback and was very much fascinated by the fact the audio might cost too much. Since he did not know audio he did not understand that my audio is not expensive at all. I use relatively expensive topological methods sometimes but if to project my costs to the cost of many other audio people them my playback is very non-expensive. He did not recognize that and he was very much using ONLY absolute cost as some kind of absolute measurements.

Arguing with him I realized that there is power in this view of his. The power is to reverse the accents, to take the prices personally and to equate price and quality. I think that method is very powerful if to keep the eyes very firmly at the ball.

This week I spoke with a cable manufacture – I do need one good 1M cable. We are accustomed that those audio cables have no sensible cost and that we pay as much for cables as much we can afford. In conversation with the manufacture I reversed the position – I run the price game. This gave me a surprising power. The manufacture said that the cable that he can let me to try will cost $850.  I proposed $1300 and asked him what sonic benefits I will have for extra $500. He said that he has his upper echelon cable that he might sell for $1300. I asked what kind sonic benefits I will have for extra $500. He did give me a standard set of believes why a cable for $500 extra will sound better. I did debate the claim. Further I asked why he feels that the set of alleged “improvements” has $500 price tag and why the same $850 cable shall not have the same set of alleged sonic features. A asked him many other questions. He did felt the he was talking with an idiot and perhaps he was correct. However, there was a brilliant moment in this conversation – he got confused with his own theory that he is in position to stratify quality of sound per cost. As soon his confusion was evident I asked him that I need a cable with defined sonic characteristics, I did explicitly enumerate those characteristics and I asked him to put a price tag on this hypothetical cable of mine. He pretty much sent me to hell, which is fine. We hanged up in firm mutual believe that we were taking with ignorant person.

I however very much like the experience. So, what I am offering to you is trying to think about price in reversed terms. Take a sheet of paper and write down the aspects of your sound that you do not like in your playback – call it The List. Then go to you playback and place a price tags on what you have. Let for instance it will be $30K, then tell to yourself that you do not mind to spend another let say $5K to the cost of your playback. Then give your list to your audio dealer, right with with the set of the improvements that you would like to accomplish. I would like you to see how your audio dealer would price the sonic benefits that you outlined with the need of additional investments. I can give to you 80% change that to get what you would like to hear as a result you would need not to buy audio but to sell your existing audio. Do not buy anything that does not serve The List. Get rid of everything from your playback that does not serve The List. Let the magnitude of price that you pay for your audio to be in direct proportion with fulfillment of your List.

In most cases your manufactures and your deals will not have language to support your attitude. That is fine but for a second imagine yourself that everyone in high-end audio has own List and force the entire industry to work for the benefit of your own List.  Suddenly the empty industry will collapse as it has no mechanism to serve somebody benefits but one it has a mechanism to furnish high price SCUs as a satisfaction of non-exiting or fake concepts.

Yesterday I asked an audio guy that I know what he would do with his playback of he won $20K in lottery and decided to spend all of them on his playback.  The guy was super enthusiastic with the ideas but the more he spoke the more it was obvious to both of us that he has nothing to do with his extra $20K. It is not the he has no wholes to patch in his sound, he does. He however has no price tags to the sonic problems that he acknowledges.

I do challenge this standing and I do feel that audio people need to fight price in audio with using price as a tool of intelligence not a tool of a cow that is being led to a butcher. Remember, the price in audio is something that we, consumers own, not something that the industry imposes to you. If you feel different then you read wrong site.  So, take a $1000, show it to your audio supplier and ask him what he can do for you and for your List for this money. See the result.

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