Yes, you can approach the purest degrees of audio reproduction, but the law of diminishing returns applies to anyone rationally considering the question.

By analogy, I might be able to go somewhere and pay a ridiculous amount of money for a hamburger. Some might say a hamburger is a hambuger, but I think there are those for whom a burger made of the finest Kobe beef, smeared with some zingy tomato concoction that makes my love of Heinz ketchup seem rather pedestrian, arugula rather than a bit of mere iceberg lettuce, and topped with smoked artichoke paste and a spattering of mustard made by monks who only turn out three dozen jars a year at $5000 per is, if not the cat's meow, then the cow's moo. Those people are idiots.

Perhaps you're prepared to drop 500 bucks for this hamburger; perhaps your taste buds are so finely tuned that you notice the zingy special ketchup and how it accentuates the seared Kobe ground in a way that Heinz on BBQ'd ground round just cannot.

Me? I just want a tasty burger. And while there are burgers out there that compare (to bring it back to the audio point) to the factory installed AM/FM radio in my mother's 1976 Dodge Comet, I'm NOT prepared to drop 500 dollars for a burger. I don't care if the cow ground itself and performed a swan dive onto the grill.

The pleasure I get from music is not sufficiently enhanced by $10,000 speakers to make it worth dropping $10,000 on speakers. In fact, I feel little more than pity for anyone who turns up their nose at one of my finely BBQ's burgers when they learn that I don't stock smoked artichoke paste in my kitchen.

Yeah, but...

Wouldn't you spend $20 to get a better meal than you could get at McDonald's? Maybe on special occasions you even spend $100 at a fancy restaurant. Not everyone who cares about sound buys the audio equivalent of a $500 hamburger. I personally have a $1500 system. That's no better than a TGI Fridays meal in audiophile terms, but it's a heck of a lot better than a Big Mac from McDonald's, even to a person like me for whom audio is a hobby rather than an obsession. I will probably never spend much more than I already have, but I can see the appeal of systems costing up to $5000. It's only beyond that that I see diminishing returns comparable to a $500 hamburger.

Yes, yes, of course the matter presents a balancing act of sorts, but I think there is some justification for spending at least a little bit of time and money assembling a proper stereo. I just wish the author had gone more into the nuts and bolts of the process, but that's probably the bread and butter of the publication he works for, so I understand.

Some of the stuff promoted by more fringe elements of the audiophile set seem beyond bizarre to me. There are a significant number of people who will tell you that you need to upgrade the electrical cable on your equipment (esp. the amp/pre-amp or receiver) in order to get the best sound. That's right, you didn't read that incorrectly: the ELECTRICAL cable, not the speaker cables.

Personally, while my expertise in electrical engineering is limited at best, I still find the very notion farcical. I can see spending a fair amount on proper speaker cables, maybe even up to $3 or 4 a foot, and can definitely pledge for a bona fide upgrade in sound quality using, say, Tara Labs products over standard generic fare. But to seriously hold that one needs to upgrade the power cable is beyond stupid to me.

Also, "audiophile"-class equipment need not be prohibitively expensive, if you do your homework. Because of the better inherent quality and superior warranties the manufacturers offer, it can even be cheaper in the long run. E.g., back in 1995, as a broke-ass college sophomore, I was bound and determined to get some high quality speakers. The net was very young then (think usenet and gopher, Netscape 1.0-era), but there was still a decent amount of info. I quickly found out that the best sweet spot of price/performance for me was going to be a bigger pair of "bookshelf" class speakers, and that even thought they might look small, they still sounded better than a big pair of Sony/Pioneer/Panasonic/whateve­r. I also found out that, oddly enough, at least at that time, models by Canadian manufacturers tended to be especially good values b/c the Canadian federal gov't had built a state of the art acoustics research facility and was making the lab available to native firms, greatly reducing their R&D costs. This helped me further narrow down my search to a handful of companies, including Paradigm, PSB, Mirage and Energy. They aren't exactly "small", but nowhere near as big as the typical Japanese firms that dominate the market.

I then went out and tested these at two stores in the town where I lived. I brought a stack of my own CDs in, and the staff set up the speakers I wanted in a private room and left me alone. It was actually really fun. At the end of the day, I opted for a pair of Paradigm Phantoms, which I still remember ran $279. I also got a nice set of stands on clearance for $50 at the same joint. I bought a couple of 10-foot lengths of TL Omni cable and had banana clips soldered on for cheap, and that was that.

12 years later and I still have these speakers, still use them almost every day, and still get complements from friends whenever I turn them up. I blew the woofer on one of them back in 2000, and incredibly still had the original invoice. I brought it back to the same place I bought it five years prior, and they installed a new woofer, for free, within 3 days. Didn't pay a cent. I can't even imagine trying to deal with Sony on a warranty claim 1 1/2 years after purchase, let alone 5.

And really, I'll probably have these speakers for decades to come. I may eventually get a pair of Magnepans, which I've always loved, but even then they'll make for an awesome 2nd set up in another room. Three hundo felt like a lot at the time, but that was easily one of the best purchases I ever made. Similarly, the NAD integrated amp I bought a year or two later (~$350), while very Spartan by today's standards, has been a wonderful piece through the years. It sounds infinitely warmer and more inviting than your standard high-tech Japanese A/V receiver, far more musical, and has been as reliable as a rock, having never even hiccuped once over the years.

I guess that is my long way of relating a short message, namely, that you don't have to spend a ton to get a much better listening experience. Ignore the fanatics, concentrate on facts and neutral reviews (as well as product quality reports), take note of warranties, and insist on auditioning equipment before purchasing. A really great system can definitely be assembled for well under a grand, and even middle-aged men would be hard pressed not to immediately acknowledge the difference.

You bring up an excellent point in that buying good quality items once will likely be much more inexpensive over the long term that buying multiple poorly made items and replacing them every couple years.

I have a nice pair of Klipsch speakers and a decent amp that were purchased around 1991, probably for about six hundred dollars total. It's still going strong 17 years later and has outlasted several other cheapo systems that when added together cost more than the much nicer Klipsch system.

It also sounds a whole lot better than the mass produced garbage surround systems that most people buy. It's only a stereo set up, no surrounds or sub, but every time people watch a movie at my place I get compliments on how good it sounds.

I know I know I said the same thing - how could the cables make a difference. Well they do, thats all I can tell you. I was using Monster Cable and then I happened to meet the owner of a company called (initials are "SR"). He set me up with some alpha quad cables on the cheap (meaning $5/foot instead of $12). Turns out the difference was about a 25-30% improvement in sound quality (tighter deeper bass and better imaging, crisper highs, all around better).

I saw the same guy demo'd a power cable on a (what was then relatively new technology) plasma TV. Guess what - less artifacts and a lot less of that "shades of gray" you see when the TV is trying to interpret the gradient of the signal.

But its relative to how much you spend. If you spend $8000 on a 70 inch plasma, then a few hundred for a cable and a voltage regulator does not sound that rediculous....especially if you live in an apartment or otherwise older building. And the cables have a migration path, meaning you do not toss them out when your amp dies.

And a word to the wise: go with separates!

Just to clarify, Ed, I was specifically talking about POWER/ELECTRICAL cables, not component or speaker cables. I tried to make that clear in referencing that I was happy to pay a reasonable amount for quality cables (I use Tara Labs stuff myself, both for speakers and components) if they make a difference. Power cables, IMO, either work, or they don't, there are no gradients in between that would in any way impact on the quality of the sound produced by equipment running off of them.