Advice on Making Audio Progress
UPDATE 2020
This commentary was written around 2010 or so. Mapleshade stopped sending me catalogs not long after this commentary was published here on the blog, probably not because of anything I’d written.
More likely it was because I never bought anything from them. And why would I? They give out some good advice, sure, but it’s mixed in with a lot of audiophile nonsense of the purest kind. The audio world was drowning in it long before I got into the hobby in the early-70s, and let me be the first to admit that I have fallen for more than my share over the years (partly because I have been doing it for so long, if that’s any excuse).
If you want to know the truth, watching videos is not the way to learn about audio.
Reading blogs is not either.
The audiophile who wants to improve his playback quality has only one option, and that is to get his hands dirty, because doing audio is the only kind of audio that works. Everyone gives out plenty of advice, including us. Testing that advice and putting it what you learn from it into practice is what separates the men from the boys, or the good stereos from the bad ones, as the case may be.
The Mapleshade website has a piece of audio advice that caught the eye of one our customers, who sent me the excerpt below.
Like most advice, especially audio advice, we find that some of it accords well with our own experience and some of it clearly does not. The relationship of good to bad is hard to determine without making a more careful study, but let’s just say that there is plenty of both and let that suffice.
That being the case, we thought it would be of service to our customers to break it down in more detail, separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak.