Amps

[Francis Chamberlain]

Several years ago I was in the market for a
good set of stereo speakers. I went to an all
professional business place that sold top
notch speakers. I was told by one of the pros that you buy a speaker that sounds good
to your ear. Don't judge the speaker by the
cost or size. He said a lower priced speaker might sound better than a higher priced speaker.
That stands for reason. I have noticed on
this forum that there are all kinds of opinions about what amp sounds the best.
I have listened to a lot of pickers over the years. To my ear some have a great tone and some play with a tone that I think could be
better.

[chas smith R.I.P.]

Many years ago, I had a friend who worked in a high-end stereo shop in Boston. This was back in the days of McIntosh Clinics. As a test and to prove a point, he had fabricated a pair of speaker cabinets out of cheap materials, might have been cardboard, and put in inexpensive speakers. Then in the demo room he "tweaked" the system to make them sound as good as some of the high end speakers.

He also made the point that regardless of what it sounds like in the showroom, unless your room dimensions are identical to the showroom's, it won't sound the same.

I was visiting a friend who was A/B/C testing 3 pairs of near field studio monitors at his console. These were $10-12,000 monitors and each pair sounded very different from each other. He got the ones that sounded the best in that room. Which also means that whatever you recorded in there is going to sound different when it's played back in a different environment.