I have seen a lot of audio enthusiasts making the same mistake, buying or building whatever their money could buy because someone said it's worth it or because they got obsessed with specifications. After they bought or build it, they believe their new piece is as good they hoped it to be. But after a while the reality sets in and they start to doubt.


The truth

'But it can't be my new speakers, right? They were supposed to be perfect! '

Well, this happened to me too. I was building speakers since high school but got stuck later on without any measuring tools losing my apatite in audio for a while. Hearing can only bring you so far, you need information and experiments to solve a puzzle (try imagining a 1000 piece puzzle while blindfolded).

At this point some people give up on audio or others start to look for something that 'must' be the cause of all the problems! cables anyone? Yes, i feel sorry for those who develop an obsession for cables.

In most cases though it is a shortage of information. Measuring equipment allows us to investigate problems or interests. Equipment and software that could do this used to be really expensive, but in the last decade it has gotten a lot cheaper making it more accessible to DIYers.

Thanks to cheap software and a high quality sound card i was able to resume my interests in audio.

I didn't want to make the same mistake twice, so instead of building something new with expensive components i wanted to learn as much as possible from cheap used equipment.
Most commercial stuff from the bigger brands isn't all that bad anyway and perfect for experiments.

These pages are a collection of findings i did while modifying/tweaking used commercial audio equipment.