Computer based audio and I2S?

Complexity is available to the hobbyist as deep as he or she is willing to dig. However, I also think that simplicity is available to a similar extent, too. There are plenty of integrated amplifiers that only require your streaming login to play from the various services available. I am under the impression that there are also many “wireless” speakers that only require a Blutooth or wi-fi connection to your phone.

I am glad that the hobby has plenty of steep-learning-curve rabbit holes to explore. Unfortunately, it is a common mistake for someone new to the hobby to get too obsessive about some relatively insignificant issue (power supplies, isolation/damping, cables, etc.), at the expense of core audiophile routes (speaker/listener placement, basic equipment, recording quality). I can name two hands’ worth of mistakes I have made that could have been avoided if I knew then what I learned from making those mistakes.

Overall, though, I think too much simplicity, at the expense of choices, is bad for the hobby. How is it a hobby if you don’t have options for experimentation and small improvements? I wonder: would simplicity grow the audiophile ranks? I didn’t get onto this journey because of the promise of easy access. I got into it, because I heard Klipsch LaScalas in an intelligently-assembled system.

4 Likes

Excellent comment. To expand on it, I have mentioned before that I have this law of minimum complexity. Any system that is designed to provide some output given some number of inputs requires a minimum amount of complexity to get the desired output.

This is based on a quote attributed to Einstein which I think is really a paraphrase, “Keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler”.

It’s not that some audio systems are simpler. Rather, the complexity has been abstracted from the user. I went from a DAC-preamp-dual monoblock amps-speakers system to my Dutch & Dutch 8cs where all I have is my roon core sending music though my Matrix to convert it to AES for the 8cs. I will remove the Matrix when the 8cs support roon natively provided the sq is there. The 8cs are very complex systems that I have some exposure to via placement inputs and eq rules.

To your point, the beauty of this hobby is we can decide how much of that complexity we wish to be exposed to and how much flexibility we want to affect it. Tweak away, or not.

1 Like