[RKDinOKC]

Funny thing is that most of the junk now at Wally World sounds as good as the high dollar stuff in the 80's. Part of the electronics revolution of the early 80's is the higher quality circuitry just got a lot cheaper.

There was also a big hubub in the early 90's when everything went digital (distribution driven). The signal to noise of digital is much better, but analog can push the dynamic range farther.

The founder of the company I work for was the recordist for our local symphony for 25 years. He had custom 1/2 inch tape equipment to insure the highest quality. I put together the system used to digitize all those 25 years of recordings. Part of the problem of going to digital recording was the limit of the dynamic range of the recording equipment. If the orchestra's volume got higher than the 100db limit it would clip, had to use 3 recorders set at different max levels and use the highest level recording that didn't get clipped. So I guess you can say that modern recordings of live performances are not as much like being there as using the older analog technology. There is a huge difference between a solo instrument playing pianissimo and the full orchestra play fortissimo. Studio mixed stuff just doesn't make that much difference.

Yeah, surround sound is cool and makes a huge difference. Surround encoding has been in the sound track of movies since 1972. I went to one of the first presentations of surround at a local high end stereo shop. As everyone was assembling in the small theater they were playing music with surround on. The presenter walked in and turned off the surround. There was a very audible awww from the crowd. The guy said. "You just went aww to an $80,000 stereo system because I turned off this $300 surround sound processor." That was pretty impressive.

Everyone's ears and tastes are different. For many the cheap stuff is fine, others are annoyed because something just doesn't sound right. If you listen to something on your system that builds musically and the hair on the back of your neck stands up, that is all the quality you need.

I have a Pioneer Elite Receiver that I run everything through because it has white noise level setting for the surround, does dolby pro and THX and has digital audio inputs. It is going to be expensive to upgrade when I go to HD cause it switches my video sources too and to old to do HDMI.

I still have my old 2 channel 360 watt amp with .001% distortion, and KV-360. It is a solid state amp designed by the guy that designed the McIntosh tube stuff, AP Vanmeter, and is as good as anything out there. It's collecting dust because the Pioneer Elite with 100watts/channel drives everything in my system just fine.