well hifi systems are made for quality (compared to pa which is for volume and other factors as well as quality) over volume as such, altho theyll still go loud for indoors, they also dont need to cater for 100+ people, so they dont have to use materials that can handle as much and instead go for softer more responsive ones such as woven kevlar woofers or silk dome tweeters

with hifi you only go for what you need, ie not a massive bass bin and tops that shakes you house,

you can spend loads on ‘hifi’ , you could easily spend much more than a grand on cables if you go to some places, and some people will spend huge amounts on theyre seperate hifi system because its meant to sound better ( and then put it in an acousticaly shit living room!) because someone in a shop says its better, things like ‘directional’ cable are meant to improve quality in theory but really cant make much difference at all, my mates dad for example has spent about 7000 on his system and it sounds brilliant, but no better than a pair of 600 pound genelic monitors.

monitors all the way imo, simple and very clear, hifi’s a waste of time and money and if its not going to be used outdoors or for small events then so is shoving a load of pa gear into a bedroom.

90% of the expensive cables are overpriced rubbish. My day job involves making sure signals peoples lives depend on gets down cables reliably and we just use normal copper cable. Of course for a big loudspeaker you use thicker cable but 79 strand or even mains electric cable (should you have a quantity of this already lying around from DIY) is perfectly good.

active or powered monitors come with a built in amp (thats what the “active” means). there are (or were) speakers sold as monitor speakers which are meant to be used with a separate monitor amplifier – although it now appears that in just 15 years (!) this term is old-fashioned and nearly all speakers sold as “monitor speakers” are active.

i remember someone saying that they always make sure theyre speaker cable ran downwards from amp to speakers as gravity made the electron flow more efficient!

im gonna find an audiophile forum and have some fun! bet some of them are well anal

@General Lighting 402656 wrote:

90% of the expensive cables are overpriced rubbish. My day job involves making sure signals peoples lives depend on gets down cables reliably and we just use normal copper cable. Of course for a big loudspeaker you use thicker cable but 79 strand or even mains electric cable (should you have a quantity of this already lying around from DIY) is perfectly good.

active or powered monitors come with a built in amp (thats what the “active” means). there are (or were) speakers sold as monitor speakers which are meant to be used with a separate monitor amplifier – although it now appears that in just 15 years (!) this term is old-fashioned and nearly all speakers sold as “monitor speakers” are active.

Makes me laugh, some of the crap that people will buy, though when you consider that the target market for most of this stuff is half-deaf 40+ year old car salesmen who like to sit around pretending to hear the differences in each-others’ stupidly OTT hi-fi systems it’s not so surprising that it exists.

No commercial studio or broadcaster uses exotic cables. As GL says, professional speaker cables are just thick copper (thick to minimise resistive loss in the cable). What does make me laugh is the fact that consumer equipment uses unbalanced connections – something that even the cheapest Behringer desk has on its inputs and outputs (it can be achieved with a very simple circuit or a transformer). OK, tbf unless you put your hifi on top of a dimmer rack you’re not going to need them on 50cm interconnects, but if you were going to design a wanky hi-fi cable, it would be the obvious place to start.

Here are a few of my favourite hi-fi “mods”.

The “Clever Little Clock”

Cable Elevators

Wooden Volume Knob

$21000 Speaker Cable

I’ve sometimes thought that if I get strapped for cash, I’ll have a root around in my loft, varnish some random crap and sell it as a hi-fi mod (make sure to allow at least 30 days “break-in” period).