Originally Posted By Jacon:
I went with a Pro-Ject EVO which has been great. Only complaint is the acrylic cover can get a little cloudy.

It’s a belt drive but it’s excellent.

Originally Posted By Mojo_Jojo:
Before getting really invested in a "hifi" system, consider if your hearing is good enough to notice the difference between that and a good package system from WalMart/Costco.   If you can't hear anything above 12Hz (shooting guns is bad for your hearing!), HiFi is pointless.  There are lots of free youtube/video tests online.  

Originally Posted By madmacs69:
Well if we really want to drink the kool-aid...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX65iSZTI7E

Originally Posted By Mojo_Jojo:
Before getting really invested in a "hifi" system, consider if your hearing is good enough to notice the difference between that and a good package system from WalMart/Costco.   If you can't hear anything above 12Hz (shooting guns is bad for your hearing!), HiFi is pointless.  There are lots of free youtube/video tests online.  

Originally Posted By Frank_B:
Another advocate of headphones.
I have to wear hearing aids and they definitely affect the sound quality.
For serious listening, I remove them and put on a set of Sennheiser MD-280s. For my use (mostly symphonic & pipe organ) they are very satisfactory.

Another plus for 'phones: binaural recordings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNbFpz9pdI

Originally Posted By spidey07:


Honestly high isn’t about hearing above 12khz. We audiophiles call it “tone”. A note isn’t a perfect sine wave.  

It’s why guitar sound different than piano. It’s why cd sounds so “brittle”. It loses the variance of waveform. Nyquist was wrong.

SACD solved that.

Originally Posted By victorgonzales:
For dj work yeah. For just playing your boomer albums on an expensive stereo not so much.  A cheap numark table and good cartridge/needle will work great. Replace needle when needed good to go.

Originally Posted By AR15Texan:
$3,000 will barely get you a high end cartridge.

Originally Posted By madmacs69:

That $99 all in one system from Walmart will eat your records though...

Originally Posted By 6EQUJ5:

If you have a collection of 25 records that you used to roll joints on you can probably play them on a Kmart system and it won't make a bit of difference.

Originally Posted By BigFatDog:
What sound are you chasing?

I have a system for 70s/80s rock and vinyl. It is built around equipment that replicates the sound when I first heard those albums.

I have a system for CDs. Like my vinyl system it is built around equipment that replicates the sound of that period. Vinyl, on that system, sounds terrible to my ear.

I will eventually add a serious tube system. I haven’t found a good excuse for spending those sorts of dollars though.

Originally Posted By AR15Texan:

Schiit Audio has respectable modern day equipment that has tubes.

Originally Posted By AR15Texan:

Schiit Audio has respectable modern day equipment that has tubes.

Originally Posted By Elvis121:
I've still got my old Technics 1200.  They used to show up for a couple hundred bucks all the time whenever some wannabe DJ needed to make rent.

Originally Posted By Superluckycat:
I recently upgraded from my early 90's Adcom system.

Rotel 1572/1582 MK II Pre & Amp
Kef Q950 speakers
Cambridge CXN100 Streamer
Pro-ject Carbon Evo TT
Klipsch sub left from my old system

I have a huge space to fill so I needed something with some punch.  I mainly listen to poorly recorded garage and sleaze rock so perfect clarity isn't really a concern for me.

https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/106895/1000001253_jpg-3363035.JPG

Originally Posted By tifosi:
Another point to make is that "room treatment" doesn't need to be rocket science and you don't
need gaudy acoustical panels mounted to your walls.
Throw rugs, furniture, plants, paintings, drapes ... all work to breakup reverberant echoes and create a more pleasing
sounding space.

Originally Posted By spidey07:


Try pulling those speakers away from rear wall, should improve imaging greatly. Even 6 inches can make a big difference.  I'd pull them out at least a foot or more from where they are.

Originally Posted By wheel:
For those with a lot of time and money on their hands, here's how to do things right.  It starts with the construction of the room.  Without a carefully designed room everything else will suffer.  Next, add top end speakers and amps, again tailored to the layout of the room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJDv3-5ArIs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYRa4a6jQRM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E33LzO5UknA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck-fZJvf39M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMrXv3K9pr8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsroD57FZnA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-THnT8LGY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPazywXrqJo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0zBAACSmI8

.

Originally Posted By Bladeswitcher:


Come on, man. You roll your joints on the sleeve, not the record. Double/gatefold albums are best.

Originally Posted By spidey07:


I can’t get into headphones. I want the stage in front of me. I want the room filled. Doesn’t have to be super loud. Just full.

Originally Posted By Subnet:
I don't want to give specific equipment recommendations, because it'll just end up being an approximation of the stuff I already own, or have owned and liked in the past. And that's not really the question you asked. You'll see this as a theme in the responses anyway, whether I decide to add to it or not.

Here's where I'm at, after 25+ years of enjoying music on various incarnations of a "HiFi". Hopefully, I can save you some time, money and frustration. These are things I wish I knew 25+ years ago.

Listening Environment
The room your speakers are in, and where/how those speakers are placed, has more of an effect on how the entire system sounds, than anything else. And it's not even close. I cannot stress this enough, and it's the hardest pill for most people (myself included once) to swallow. It's the least sexy thing to talk about, and the details of the actual listening environment are always left out of people's siglines on audio forums. If you start chasing "perfection" or incremental improvements by way of equipment purchases, just know that the room they're in matters a lot more than what you're doing right now. It's difficult for me to articulate how massive this effect is.

The reason I'm bringing this up, is more to level-set expectations - not to convince you that you need to design and build a dedicated listening space. If you have the space, the budget and/or the time, the room where the music will be enjoyed is the variable that will affect the end result the most. If the next thought that comes to mind after hearing this is "That's great and all, but I don't have the money or the space to build a dedicated listening room, or to remodel any existing space I already have with acoustic treatments and all that - I still have to live here, and I'd kind of like my living room or my den...to just be a living room or a den".

Neither do I, ditto on all that, and congrats - you're normal. But still, again, never forget any of this while you're obsessing over the finer arcane details of your speaker's crossover design, the impedance of the  phono cartridge, whether you should bi-amp your speakers, and every other stupid rabbit hole you may find yourself going down. You've been tasked with moving a pile of rocks across the yard, and you're spending all of your energy on the tiny little pebbles, while ignoring the massive fuckin' boulders. You're making progress in the strictest and most technical definition of the word, but...bro. Know what I mean?

Speakers
Your entire system's sound will be permanently influenced by the massive fixed variable that is the room it's in (I'm beating a dead horse at this point), and the second most important thing that will affect the overall sound are the speakers, along with where and how they are placed. You can think of your speakers as a giant gazillion-band equalizer...that you can't adjust, save for moving them around in the room. It's fixed. I refuse to give specific recommendations here. All I will mention is that as a rule, all else being equal (all else is seldom equal, but I digress) they're more fun to listen to when they're as large as I can get away with, and move a lot of air. I can't really say much here, other than...if they sound good to you, then they are good. Reading about how good a speaker sounds, is about as interesting or useful as describing sex to somebody else who's never had any.

If you're able, listen to as many speakers as you can. Make peace with the fact that she's going to fuck differently when you...I mean, they're going to sound different when you bring them home. Do the best you can. Seek out resources online, where people independently test and measure loudspeaker performance, properly and objectively with lab instrumentation. If you want the safest bet (without being able to listen yourself) when evaluating these independent lab tested results, lean towards the largest speakers you can tolerate, with the flattest response curve, that fit your budget. They're not going to measure that way from the couch in your room anyway (have I beat this horse enough?). Ignore any and all subjective descriptions of the sound, if mentioned. It's all bullshit, and none of it will apply to you anyway. Ignore the manufacturers published frequency response curves, they're (mostly) all bullshit.

And...you know...make sure they look cool, too. You'll be staring at them a lot, since they're also doubling as furniture or at least decor.

Receiver and/or Amplifier
"HiFi" and the idea of describing yourself as an "audiophile" really started to become a thing, in the 50s and 60s. And it mattered more, back then. A lot more. You have to consider the context - if the goal was to reproduce recorded music as accurately as possible, there was a MASSIVE gap between the performance that was recorded, and what was actually possible to reproduce in the home. Massive. It was a time of near exponential improvements in amplifier (and speaker) design, year by year. It's difficult to overstate how large the gap was in terms of accuracy, between reasonably affordable stuff that most anybody could (and did) obtain, and the really expensive stuff reserved for the upper middle classes and the wealthy, that was actually beginning to approach reasonable levels of fidelity to the original performance. This exponential improvement eventually began to taper off, and by the late 70s...all of the low hanging fruit had been picked. In my humble opinion. In terms of actual fidelity, it's been tinier and tinier incremental improvements ever since. And the cost associated with each of those (increasingly miniscule) improvements has become...nutty - In all things audio, not just receivers and amplifiers. The point of diminishing returns probably peaked in the late 70s or early 80s. Somewhere in there.

I say all that, to say this - don't obsess over this. It's not necessary anymore, and it's no longer retard-levels of expensive to get there, like it used to be. Good amplifier circuit design is extremely well understood, and has been for a very long time. The low hanging fruit has already been picked, and our bellies are full. There are no industry secrets left. The boulders have already been moved across the yard. Decades ago. All we're doing at this point, is picking up pebbles.

If you're picking up a receiver and can't listen to it first, make sure it's as powerful as it needs to be (consider your speakers), make sure that it's performance has been independently measured with good lab equipment by someone you trust, and make sure it has enough inputs and any other feature, for however you intend to use it.

And just as important - make sure it looks cool.

Making Sure it Looks Cool
I joke about this a lot, but I'm only half-joking. We listen with our eyes, as much as we listen with our ears (we eat with our eyes, too). In fact, this tendency of ours is so incredibly powerful and influential, that it's something we have to deliberately account for, and guard against, when evaluating the sound (or taste, in food) of something. It's why blind listening (and tasting) exists. It really is that powerful.

So what do I say? Don't think of it as a bug in human nature and behavior (even though it is), think of it as a feature. Embrace it, and lean way into it. We've already established that the important fundamentals of circuit and loudspeaker design were figured out decades ago, and that the easy gains have all been made - and affordably, now. So the biggest stuff left on the table that's actually pretty easy to "hear" (see what I did there?)...is the aesthetics of the stuff, and other emotional intangibles. Again - if it sounds good, it IS good. Even if your brain is being tricked by your eyes. It's the same brain that's listening to it, ain't it?

Bucket list item for me? A Pioneer SX-1980. Know why? Because it does the important stuff perfectly well when measured (and heard), but the most important part? Look at the fucking thing. I want one. Is it worth the money, based on it's objectively measured performance? Fuck no, it's grossly overpriced and obscenely so. Can you buy something that's just as nice (or even better), objectively, for less money? Hell yes you can, and you probably should. Buying a minty restored one if pants-on-head retarded for that reason alone.

Still want one, though. Will have one, eventually.

Turntable
Since this comes up in every "audiophile" and "HiFi" thread, I'm going to get this out of the way, right from the jump: I love vinyl records. I own a metric fuckload of vinyl records. When I sit down to listen to music at home, it's usually a vinyl record. When I pay money for music, including brand new albums by brand new artists, it's always to purchase a vinyl record. I made myself "Arfcom famous" by pretending to be an old-school FM radio DJ, and doing a live "radio" show over the Internet, where much of the gimmick was that I played vinyl records on the Internet. I. Love. Records.

Vinyl records are, objectively speaking, an inferior form of playing back recorded music. They have less dynamic range than what is possible on a digital recording. They have surface noise that can only be reduced to near imperceptibility, but never completely eliminated. They're fragile, and finicky. They require a lot of care in handling, cleaning, storage, etc, to ward off a degradation in sound quality over time. They aren't capable of storing more than about 45 minutes of sound (ish), without making compromises during the cutting process that further degrade the sound quality over the original source material (tape or digital). New ones are expensive to manufacture well, and it's reflected in the purchase price. They have flaws inherent in the physical design that are very difficult to overcome, like inner groove distortion. Speaking of distortion, they're not as free of it as a digital recording inherently is. The equipment required to play them back with an acceptable level of fidelity is cumbersome to use, and requires a fair amount of careful adjustment and alignment (which requires specialized tools and knowledge). They're very susceptible to variables that are just not present in digital playback mediums. The sound (or rather, accuracy thereof) is affected by the design of the cartridge, the design of the stylus, the design of the preamplifier circuit, the vertical tracking force applied to the stylus, the azimuth angle of the stylus, the vertical tracking angle of the stylus, the rotational consistency/accuracy of the platter, room vibrations that make their way through the turntable and into the stylus...this goes on, and on, and on, and on.

And when all of these variables are accounted and adjusted for, and when everything is behaving the way it's supposed to (often after some bother and expense)...what you're left with is a recording that is being played back with a level of fidelity that is...really damned close to an identical master recording, being played digitally.

"Close enough" is as good as you're ever going to get - and that can be really damned close, too. Make peace with it.

Do I give a shit? Nah. I love records, I prefer listening to records, I prefer buying records, and hell - I've even come to love the satisfaction I get from listening to a record that sounds...near as makes no difference to me, as good as my best digital copy. Because I know how hard it was to do that, relatively speaking.

A turntable needs a platter that rotates at exactly 33 1/3 (or 45) RPM (and never varies from that speed), it needs an acceptable level of isolation from the room (especially with the volume cranked) to keep those vibrations from being introduced through the stylus and affecting the sound, it needs to not introduce any audible noise of it's own (from the motor, for example), and it needs a cartridge and stylus capable of accurately tracking and reproducing the sound cut in the grooves (there's no substitute for listening, and for objective lab measurements). It's tonearm needs to have provisions for adjusting the vertical tracking force, the horizontal/azimuth angle at which the cartridge is mounted to the headshell, the overhang of the cartridge relative to the headshell, and the vertical tracking angle of the cartridge. It needs an accurate way to adjust anti-skate. And for you, the buyer/owner, you need the tools necessary to measure and adjust all of this.

And you'll need a preamp (whether discrete, or built into the turntable, or built into your receiver) that is compatible with the cartridge (mostly coil type) that you're using, that accurately reverses the RIAA equalization curve applied to vinyl records, and is otherwise designed well enough to not introduce it's own "color" to the sound. For what it's worth, in terms of circuit design, this was figured out eons ago. Don't overthink it, and don't spend an absurd of amount of money chasing rainbows with it.

Those are the important bits. The rest is...convenience and personal preference. Also - it needs to look cool.

CD Player
Buy one that looks cool, and has the features you like. I feel like I've already said too much about it.

Final Thoughts
There's an old adage you'll hear sometimes: Musicians listen to music. Audiophiles listen to their equipment.

I'm not immune to any of this - even as a musician. I often have to remind myself from time to time, that the whole reason I'm doing any of this, is because I love listening to music. Anybody remember the music? Yeah, we should probably be listening to the music. That's why we're here. Is the song even any good? Do I really need $3k in  equipment to hate the way Lars drumming was recorded on St Anger, or can I hear that loud and clear through the speaker on my iPhone? Do I really need $3k in equipment to know how good David Gilmore is on the guitar, or how brilliant Kris Kristofferson is as a lyricist? They're definitely enhanced by $3k worth of goodies, though. But I never want to forget what the whole point of any of this is, and I wish I'd have been able to explain  that to younger me, 25+ years ago.

It's been many, many years ago, but I saw a picture of Alan Parsons in his living room with his HiFi system in the background. I went "Hell...my shit's nicer than that".

Alan Goddamned Parsons

Anyway...never lose perspective.

Originally Posted By spidey07:


That’s true. You don’t have to spend a ton of money to get great sound. I’ve been audiophile for 40 years.

It’s not the gear. It’s the music. But you do have to spend some coin on the speakers. Once you have that then it’s all about the source. I have Martin Logan requests. Great speakers!  Love them. But damn they will show you shitty recording. Just as much of a great recording.

I honestly thing I would be a great recording enigeer. I hear stuff most people can’t.

Originally Posted By Frank_B:
Another advocate of headphones.
I have to wear hearing aids and they definitely affect the sound quality.
For serious listening, I remove them and put on a set of Sennheiser MD-280s. For my use (mostly symphonic & pipe organ) they are very satisfactory.

Another plus for 'phones: binaural recordings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bNbFpz9pdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImoQqNyRL8Y

Originally Posted By Subnet:
Listening Environment
The room your speakers are in, and where/how those speakers are placed, has more of an effect on how the entire system sounds, than anything else. And it's not even close. I cannot stress this enough, and it's the hardest pill for most people (myself included once) to swallow. It's the least sexy thing to talk about, and the details of the actual listening environment are always left out of people's siglines on audio forums. If you start chasing "perfection" or incremental improvements by way of equipment purchases, just know that the room they're in matters a lot more than what you're doing right now. It's difficult for me to articulate how massive this effect is.

Originally Posted By Slare:
The turntable is the only thing I'd buy new, or of a well known nearly new vintage.

Everything else would be used, but I'm in a big metro area and great used gear can be found in terms of speakers/amps/AVRs.  Nobody wants tower speakers anymore, and lots of high end AVRs are dirt cheap due to old HDMI specs.  Separates are tougher but still a lot to be saved used.

Dedicated music system for me would be 2.0 with big towers and enough power behind them, no fussing with subs.

Originally Posted By Mojo_Jojo:
Before getting really invested in a "hifi" system, consider if your hearing is good enough to notice the difference between that and a good package system from WalMart/Costco.   If you can't hear anything above 12Hz (shooting guns is bad for your hearing!), HiFi is pointless.  There are lots of free youtube/video tests online.  

Originally Posted By JamesTKirk:
Inherited a carver sonic holography C4000 preamp, carver am/fm receiver, and carver amp and turn table many years ago. My guess they date back to 80’s, maybe earlier. They have been in storage.

Not knowing anything about sound systems, would it be worth setting up this system? Which speakers for it?

Currently typically listen to music  streamed from my phone to some speakers so not super picky about sound so far.