http://www.oswaldsmillaudio.com/about.html"Audio. Today.
I think you can talk about two ways of pursuing audio today. One way is the mainstream of magazines and their online variants. This way is more about simply buying things than it is about sound. We all know that people today like buying things, and with audio, you are given a continuous excuse to buy new things (it's called upgrading) by the magazines and webzines whose very premise is to market an unending, monthly stream of continuously improving components, each one replacing and surpassing the next. One problem with this approach, which you can confirm yourself by visiting high end audio boutiques, or even better, visiting shows like CES in Las Vegas, is that even after spending $100,000 or more (easy to do) you are still in all likelihood going to end up with an unlistenable mess. You won't be able to figure out why. You bought the A list components, but it turns out sound is more than the sum of these parts. You will now be on an endless chase down the rabbit hole, looking for exotic cables, capacitor upgrades and cryogenic treatment of power cords, outlets and even circuit breakers (not kidding here, though I wish I was) to fix the "problem." The problem, of course, was that you actually believed that the magazines were giving you honest, well informed advice, not marketing the wares of their advertisers. Eventually you will either give up, convincing yourself you like what you have (it is, after all, rated A, B, C or whatever), or you enter neurosis.
The other way is entirely different. You will have to go Underground. The people who pursue the best possible sound have nothing to do with the way I describe above. They either build their own tube amplification, or they find or restore the best tube amplifiers of the past. The people on this path use highly efficient loudspeakers, usually in horns or as fullrange drivers, and these speakers are almost always vintage. The reason is simple- almost all speakers made today are awful. They have been designed for decades for a world of (cheap) solid state, high power amplification. If you were to tear open the most expensive speakers made today, Focal Grand Utopia, Wilson, etc, you would have nothing more than a pile of drivers which cost a few hundred dollars each, or even much less. If you look at the prices from the 1930's for professional RCA speakers in the RCA Museum and Archive section, you will realize just how expensive it was to make the loudspeakers of the past. Those speakers had to be very efficient, using field coil or Alnico permanent magnets, but because the tube amplifiers of that time had very limited power capacities, the voice coil gaps and dimensions generally were very close tolerances. Today's high efficiency pro sound drivers are made for running with high powered solid state amps, and their designs are compromised to ensure the drivers don't blow up when hit with great amounts of power. Loudspeakers can be likened to musical instruments. You cannot get a violin to put out the acoustic power of an electric guitar. This does not mean, by the way, that such vintage speakers cannot be played to more than adequate volumes for home listening. Many of these speakers were used in cinemas and stadiums- just not with cheap, multi thousand watt solid state amplifiers.
So, what does this all mean?"
