Dipping that first toe into the audio stream can be a daunting challenge. I have a friend who has been frozen at water’s edge for some time; he’s wary, a little scared, and more than a little intimidated. It was his misfortune to launch his voyage by reading several issues of The Absolute Sound, one of the two leading high-end audio mags. TAS could scare the stuffings out of anyone. I’m a regular reader and thus accustomed to the Dadaist prices peppered throughout your basic TAS issue, but even now there are times when I sit there aghast at the obscene extravagance on display. Even though both TAS and Stereophile make it a point to cover equipment at realistic price points, as a rule the cover stories are about insanely expensive gear. Thus the questing neophyte may well get the impression that stark choices await: go for high-end audio, or pay for a college education; buy a great stereo, or buy a house.
Audiophiles—and I include myself—aren’t always as helpful as we might be. Too often we’re in show-off mode, eager to wow our guest with our latest acquisitions. That can be fun but is hardly any way to treat people who are understandably cautious about getting too involved. Usually it just scares folks off.
Even worse, such insensitivity ignores the most basic fact of high-end audio, which is that the lion’s share of the improvement happens at the first stage of the process, at quite modest prices. Recently I put that philosophy into practice and gave my friend a demonstration of what an enormous difference can be had at a realistic price.
We went from a price of $0 to $400, no more. I restricted our goal to his favorite way to listen, which is via headphones plugged into his laptop. At $0 we began with his standard issue iPod earbuds. We plugged those into the headphone jack of my desktop computer, and he listened through them for a while. Nothing really all that wrong with the sound; it’s muddy from overemphasized low midrange and upper bass, but that can help to mask the unpleasant artifacts produced by highly compressed mp3 files, not to mention the restricted response of the earbuds themselves, not to mention the humdrum DAC and amp built into a computer.
Then came the leap: I replaced the earbuds with Sennheiser HD600 headphones, available from Amazon for $399.95. A computer’s built-in amp is just barely up to the challenge of driving Senn 600s to sufficient volume, but it can be done. More to the point, the improvement in sound was stupendous—from muddy and artificial to alive and vibrant. That’s because the change crossed the boundary between ordinary and high-end audio, that all-important first step, the one that makes all the difference. The Senn HD 600 isn’t the latest word in posh headphones; in fact, it’s several generations removed from being Sennheiser’s glamour puss. But it’s still one whale of a headphone, it’s still in production, and at its current $400 price point it’s probably the sweetest deal in all high-end audio.
The point having been made, I gave him a demonstration of what happens when you climb the headphone audio ladder to a very high point: $9000 worth of headphone listening by way of Sennheiser HD 800 headphones, Cardas and Nordost cables, Luxman P-1u headphone amp, Audio Research DAC7, Musical Fidelity V-Link II. Naturally there is a dramatic improvement; nobody could miss it. But it isn’t the quantum leap represented by the shift from white earbuds to the Senneiser HD 600s, nowhere near. The higher you go on the audio scale the more subtle become the improvements. It was that $0 to $400 that mattered; the remaining $8600 was all about fine-tuning, tweaking, spiffing up, detailing, and polishing.
And that’s just not worth it to any number of people—a very sensible position to take, in my humble opinion. Since that first step is about 80% the way to the top, it’s joyously achievable by any number of folks, and it’s the 80% that counts. The industry magazines stumble badly in referring to it as “Entry Level”, a subtly demeaning term that smacks of adolescence, novitiate, and probation. Entry Level, my foot. It’s almost the whole mountain.
Maybe the industry mags should treat their so-called “Entry Level” as mainline, and include a short section called “The Last Mile” for the insanely expensive stuff. Then, with any luck, the high-end audio industry might stop scaring off most of its potential customers.