I wouldn’t borrow money, personally, I’ll spend far too much of my savings but that’s money I’ve already got, I don’t want to be on the hook to anyone. I respect your aesthetic infatuation for vintage amplifiers, aesthetics was the main reason I got my first wooden cased 1970s Luxman amplifier, thankfully it also sounded amazing. I don’t hear it said much anymore but the “rule” when putting together a hifi system used to be; spend half your budget on the speakers as they’ll have the biggest impact on sound quality. Another way of putting it would be good speakers paired with a shit amp is better than a good amp paired with shit speakers. Also, remember the rule of diminishing returns. A $2000 system is far far better than a $100 Bluetooth speaker. An $8000 system is a lot better than a $2000 system. A $50,000 system is only a little bit better than an $8000 system. And don’t spend money on fancy cables, fancy cables are a scam

Haven’t listened to them. It’s weird that they reused the ES14 model number and called back to that famous speaker in their marketing when they didn’t make it look like the old speaker, or even like a “retro” speaker. And they used a crossover when the ES14s whole claim to fame was that the drivers, baffle, and cabinet were all carefully designed so the woofer rolled off naturally with no crossover at all and complimented the tweeter roll off which used only a single capacitor as a crossover.

Not that any of that changes the new ES14n sounding good or not. Just a weird marketing choice with all passionate pedants in one of their key customer demographics

Ruby Blue by Róisín Murphy

…if the goal of an audiophile is to get the highest quality reproduction of a recording

If yes, then yes, if no, or not only, then why not?

I’ve also been told many times that true Audiophiles don’t use Tone Controls at all and prefer the Music flat without any EQ

Yeah but people also bang on endlessly about DSP and how it’s the audiophile equivalent of god spunking in your ear holes and you can’t audiophile without it. This isn’t really a community strong on consensus despite how often individuals talk in absolutes.

I’m fairly confident that audiophiles don’t use tone controls, except for all the audiophiles that do use tone controls. Now as far TRUE audiophiles are concerned, well, true is the kind of emotional identifier people use when they wanna pretend the subjective statement they are about to make is objective

In order of most to least dramatic and greatest to least risk to companion equipment:

The worst amp failure I’ve experienced began with me thinking maybe I could smell something weird in the 24 hours prior to the failure but couldn’t track down the smell, then over the course of about 30 mins the right channel started sounding increasingly fuzzy, then a distinct burning chemical smell was clearly coming from the amp so I turned it off. A few hours later I tried turning it on and nothing happened. It was dead

The second most dramatic amp failure was the left channel getting a lot quieter than the right channel but the amp otherwise still working

The third most dramatic was the ‘peak’ indicators flashing even with the volume turned all the way down

Anyway, even in the worst event the drama was objectionable low, if I had to rank it I’d put it below getting a paper cut. The risk to human life, and any patched equipment, was similarly low

I did have a pair of speakers crapout on me and I never figured out why. One day they were fine. The next day they sounded horrible and if you gentle manipulated the cones they felt like they were filled with gravel. My partner said they’d turned the system on and it made a loud noise, then sounded horrible when they tried to play music, and there isn’t really anyway to fuckup pressing the power button and the play button on the CD player. A multimeter showed no DC at the speaker terminals, and the amp worked and sounded fine with other speakers. The tweeters on the speakers were fine, it was just the mid/bass drivers that died, no problems with the crossover, new drivers worked fine when installed.

I doubt it’s an unpopular option in this sub.

Apple is quality in a very specific way, the kind of way that refuses to play nice with non-Apple products. As for connectivity issues between Apple products, that more of a Apple puts their fingers in their ears and shouts can’t hear you can’t hear you doesn’t count if I can’t hear you nah nah nah nah nah

For smart phone purposes Apple is great. For home audio purposes Apple is so far off my radar it’s not even an option being considered and rejected, it’s just not an option