~100 pieces of gear later, I think I spent years choosing the wrong way. How do you do it?
I was answering someone's "how do I become an audiophile" thread earlier and ended up summarising my own road for the first time. It wasn't entirely comfortable reading, so I thought I'd put the question to a wider room.
There are still around twenty amps and receivers and fifteen sets of speakers in my garage and attic. Over the years I've had well over a hundred pieces through the house.
The embarrassing part is the method. For a long time it was: read forums, find someone describing a sound beautifully - the midrange on this receiver, the way those speakers image - buy it hoping this was finally the one. It never was. Not once. And I don't think those descriptions were dishonest; I'm fairly sure people meant every word. They were describing what their ears were doing. Mine kept reporting something else.
To be fair to the road, every single piece gave me something - some particular quality I hadn't heard before, a thing I only understood by living with it. None of it was wasted. It was just an expensive way to learn what I was actually looking for.
Eventually I stopped hunting and started modifying instead: retuning amps and speakers until they produced that goosebump moment. Seventies gear especially, which in my experience repays the work more generously than anything newer. A typical seventies amp means seven to fifteen electrolytics per channel coming out, and I audition replacements in the actual unit rather than trusting datasheets. That's when it finally clicked - and I ended up doing the same for friends' systems.
So how do the rest of you cut your path? Reviews and impressions? Measurements first? Never buy without hearing it? Buy blind and flip whatever misses? Or have you also ended up building the thing you wanted rather than finding it?
Mostly I'm curious whether the "read the glowing description, buy it, be quietly disappointed" loop is a rite of passage everyone goes through, or just my own expensive detour.