Pitfall Six: Wattage
One special pitfall exists for solid state gear, and that's wattage.
People tend to assume that more watts means more sound and better sound.
This is rarely true.
Large speakers, it's true, tend to need more current
to do their jobs, and some of the best speakers on earth place an insanely
demanding load on an amplifier, requiring (among other things), serious
wattage. But as wattage goes up, so (generally) will distortion. A 1000W
per channel amp is not better than a 100W per channel amp: in fact, it's
usually a lot worse.
Tube amps fans are more or less immune to the more watts=better watts
thinking. Tube amps generally can't, by design, produce hundreds of watts.
(Or if they can, you won't want to be in the same room as them: it would
be like living inside a toaster.) Some tube amps stop at 10W. Depending on
how those watts are used, that can be all you need.
Don't assume that all solid state gear sounds the same. Maybe it should,
but it absolutely does not. I auditioned an amp from Bryston, Classe and
Aragon when building my first system. My son and I both did blind
comparison tests with them and we could infallibly tell which one was
hooked up.
This isn't because one was simply better than the others; they
were just different. My wife liked the Aragon. My son and I liked the
Bryston.
Sources fall into two general camps, digital and analog. CDs, DVDs (as
well as some radio broadcasts, some kinds of tape, and music from
computers) is generally digital. How well digital music sounds, comes down
to one thing, more or less, in the end -- how well a device called a DAC
converts the music back to analog form. Ultimately, sound has to be
converted to analog form, because that's what speakers need.
All digital music inevitably suffers from something called quantization
error, which is basically the gap between what the sound was really doing,
and what the digital encoding of the numbers says the sound was doing.
These never line up exactly, but they line up so closely that people can't
hear the difference. Well, most people: some people claim they always hear
a difference.
Analog sources, on the other hand, don't introduce any error if they are
built perfectly. Unfortunately, it turns out to be impossible to build
perfect electronics, and when analog systems do introduce error, it's
harder to control. Analog formats include phonographs, most kinds of tape,
and most radio broadcasts.
Since all music needs to be played into a speaker as an analog signal, it
might make sense to leave everything analog: you're going to pay the price
of analog inaccuracies anyway, so there's no point in adding digital
quantization error as well, right?
But it's not that simple.
Well done
digital sources outperform anything but insanely expensive analog sources
-- and it's gotten all but impossible to buy music in analog form, anyway.
The upshot is that errors in either format are now controllable to the
point that they are almost inaudible — if you spend the money.
So in effect, digital has won this war. You can still find audiophiles
that sniff at CDs and won't part with their $10,000 record players for
anything, but it's a dying breed. With the advent of SACD format, with far
less quantization error then even the best recorded CD, it's hard to
justify going any other way.
So you're going to splash out on a high quality CD/SACD and DVD player (or
a universal player, which handles both). High end DVD players cost well
over a thousand dollars. When you have to have one, it's time to recognize
that your soul is no longer your own.
But it gets worse. There is a final indignity in store, a final horror you
will face in getting your system perfect, or at least respectable.
I am
referring, of course, to the cables.
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