If you can really hear the difference between one speaker and another, or one cd player or another, and you can afford the more expensive equipment, then you should buy the higher end stuff. That's what a wise old man told me while teaching me about high end audio equipment.

In the early 1990s, after I got out of school and started to make a little money, I was buying a ton of CDs and going to tons of concerts, and just really getting into music.

Then one day, sitting on the floor of my apartment with a few buddies over for Happy Hour, as was our custom, something clicked in my head and I remember thinking "Time to upgrade my speakers!" - my $200 Advents that had gotten me through high school and college. So off I went on a quest for better sound. I assembled a dozen "reference" CDs, which I took to store after store, listening to how different equipment reproduced tracks that I knew so well.

I ended up in a little store in an office park outside of Baltimore (I lived in Arlington, VA at the time) on a snowy weekend in February. The owner of the store gave me a six-hour lesson on high end audio equipment. It was awesome! He showed me how to position speakers, where to sit, and how to listen ("Spit out the gum" "Close your eyes").

I went back several times to see the old man, and I would always ask him stuff like "Is it really worth the extra money to get the $50/foot cable?" He would give the technical reasons for the difference in price, but at the end he'd say "If you can hear the difference, and you can afford it, then you should buy the better stuff. If you can't hear the difference, then don't."

I ended up buying a $1000 pair of Morel speaker and a B&K amp and pre-amp for another $1000. They were about the least expensive components he carried. That set-up has given me so much pleasure over the years. Everywhere I go I compare the sound of stereos to mine, and every single time I hear something that I think even comes close to mine, it ends up being a pretty high end set-up.

If my house burned down and I had to buy a new stereo, would I spend that kind of money (adjusted for inflation) again? In a second. Am I an audiophile? No. All I know is that if you're going to sit and listen to good music, you should really seriously consider a high end stereo.