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In the Forum: Audio News
In the Thread: The essence of High-End Audio industry
Post Subject: Strip the Olympian and Enjoy the Journey!Posted by Arno P on: 1/4/2018
In order to answer the question if the sound of an Olympian is doable at home, it can be answered in a couple of ways. Using the same components and configuration, you get the same sound (for the doable part, how much money can you invest?). With this in mind you should be stripping the Olympian from all needless aspects, needless for sound I mean. Cut the bling, wood work etc etc. With a minimalistic version like that, can you affort the components and can you maintain "listening in the dark" without the interest of the looks.
Now to the thing that really matters, it's not the Olympian but it's what gives you the goosebumps when listening to what music. Is the emotion of the people playing the music fully transferred to your brain/feeling to experience the similar deep emotion?
Listening a lot to audio systems and building them you may discover that experiencing the ultimate musical emotion is not up to the investment of a system but it is linked to the right balance of all elements. Eg. listening jerry mulligan 50's vinyl record on my DIY horn/valve system sucked me into it and I could not get it. Old recording, mono, lows and highs cut off but the coherence of the performance and recording made it work...goosebumps (what a waste to build the over-the-top audioo system over 30+ years ;-)).
Now if someone could affort an instant purchase of an Olympian set, it can be appreciated to listen to but frankly I think you would be missing a lot of the story of enjoying small steps of improvements having your system grow with you and above all with how you listen to and experience music. A huge leap doesn't give you a reference you can compare with, small steps are still digestable to notice and merge into your audio-gene-experience. A too big chunk will not reveal the details of all excellent micro-areas of excellence since you never learned to recognize these.
All in all, think in terms of experiencing musical emotions and what ever works for you now (and is affordable) will show it's flaws and you want to make the next very enjoyable upgrade, whether it is a new component or a simple tweak of the loudspeaker placement.

Enjoy the Journey!

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