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After 45 or so years being into stereo/audio I have opinions. 5.) Fancy cables. Yes I've occasionally heard a significant difference, but the money is much better invested elsewhere. What's the wire inside of your walls/pieces made of?
Open baffle, line arrays, and vinyl can all easily be Cheap and Cheerful.To me, a large part of what "cheap and cheerful" involves is a willingness to try new things, and provide a different perspective to the idea that you need to always spend more to get satisfaction from the hobby. It's about being open minded, not about closing things off.
2.) Crummy rooms. Most overbuy gear for the given room (an integral part of any speaker based system). Dedicated rooms are often "spares", so are small or poorly shaped. Shared rooms have highly compromised layouts and/or hours of use. Few are acoustically isolated. Some dedicated rooms are overblown with poorly understood treatments. If you don't have a good room don't get frustrated, consider headphones, seriously.Cujobob: You can take care of poor rooms rather easily if you know what you're doing but you have to select the right speakers and treatments. It is essential to have speakers with good directivity.3.) Poor layouts. Talking here about speakers/listening location. I'm a huge fan of near-field. Anything else sounds like vague sound coming from the other end of the room versus images snapping into place. Helps speakers perform as intended and takes the room out of the equation. This is how our recordings were made. Again the Cheap & Cheerful gang seems to understand this by default (not having huge rooms to start with).Cujobob: This comes down to personal preference IMO. You can make most rooms work.4.) Stupid speaker designs. Dipoles and vertical arrays come to the top of my list. Our speakers need to follow the example used to make the recordings. Very few sound sources are vertically oriented dipoles or arrays. I prefer precise imaging to "walls of sound". Vertical arrays can't image vertically and follow any sane budget use super cheap (low quality) drivers. And yet again, these stupid designs are typically more expensive, so score another point for the C & C crowd.Cujobob: line arrays lower distortion because the individual drivers aren't forced into doing very much. Inexpensive drivers CAN be very good but it depends on how cheap we are talking and how well they are designed. I enjoy a variety of speaker designs, but it is difficult to make many types work in small rooms.5.) Fancy cables. Yes I've occasionally heard a significant difference, but the money is much better invested elsewhere. What's the wire inside of your walls/pieces made of? Why connect 10 gauge power cords to a house system with 14 gauge wiring? Almost no gear has shielded internal wiring/components. Best to use the power cord provided and shop for the rest from Monoprice/Parts Express. Simply buy shielded single ended interconnects and speaker cable of the right gauge for your nominal impedance/length. Cujobob: You don't have to spend a lot to have good cabling. The differences heard will likely be from engineering differences instead of quality differences from materials (unless comparing quality cables to REALLY poor quality cables)7.) Power conditioners. Unless you live with a very old, ratty utility district I doubt you'll hear much of a difference (I couldn't in a 60 year old house that had horrible wiring). The only time I've heard a noticeable improvement was after the 80 year old factory next door that I was at shut down for the night. Try before you buy. Again don't cave to peer pressure.Cujobob: This...depends, IMO. With Class D, specifically, it is very important but many devices are total garbage IMO.8.) Not enough invested in the speakers. With rapid computer related advancements it's hard to justify putting serious money into sources/DAC's, let alone vinyl/tape. Amplification serves the speakers, which have the hardest job to do being the only transducer in the system and has to work under unknown circumstances. Speakers are the biggest variable in system performance. I applaud the increased popularity of powered/active speakers, even those with built-in DAC's and wireless connections. Cujobob: speakers are most everything.
After 45 or so years being into stereo/audio I have opinions. Over the years my system has gotten smaller, cheaper, and simpler. No longer want (or need to thanks to technology advancements) spend the price of a new car on audio. I'll admit that I'm not yet down to the Cheap & Cheerful guidelines, but I enjoy the spirit of it very much. So much of audio is an issue of the kings new robe (no one wanting to admit they can't hear or don't like the latest promoted product). Feel free to contribute.
It's a great time to be a frugal audiophile.
The Cheap & Cheerful section is cool, but let's not confuse or compare the items in it to "audiophile" quality sound or gear. High fidelity has a steep price, and there's no circumventing that reality. And if you can't hear the differences among components in vastly different price categories, don't draw the conclusion that your cheap gear is just as good. It isn't. Does one need to spend a gazillion bucks on a pair of speakers? Nope. But they're gonna need to spend several times more than a "cheap & cheerful" price to achieve "audiophile sound quality" status. Sure, sound quality in music is subjective, but so is every other art form. Comparing cheap & cheerful gear to audiophile gear is like comparing an 8 yr. old's crayola drawing to artists whose work is displayed in major art galleries.
