How do you deal with the OCD part

Stay off the internet.

 

I simply tell myself the following:

1. That item that you think is such a great deal: it's going to come around again. When it does, it will probably be cheaper. There is no sense of urgency to this purchase.

2. So you're looking at something new. That item that just came out (or is in production) that has either next to no reviews or a few reviewers that are conductors on the hype train? In a few months you're going to see twenty of them on the Head-Fi "For Sale" forums. If you still want to try it out, buy it there and let someone else take the initial depreciation hit. Half price Hugos anyone? Fidelio X2's and HE-400S's for 33% off retail already? A whole Oort cloud of PS Audio Sprouts? Even better if the item has a transferable warranty. (Most of the time, by the time the item hits the secondary market in sufficient quantities, you've already figured out why it's there.)

3. You should be buying for longevity. Audio gear isn't like a smartphone or a shitty discount printer. Good, well-built audio equipment can survive from the birth of your first born child until they go to college. It can outlive your cat or dog. You see that Theta DAC from 1994 that just received it's first needed maintenance just last year? Back when that came out I was still wearing flannels and thinking about how terrible it would be to grow old. My Gen 1 iPod made it through two long term relationships and the first four years of a marriage with just a battery replacement. There's a reason we still buy HD6X0's even above and beyond the sound quality - they're pretty durable and when they break we can easily fix them ourselves.

4. Every hour I spend shopping for gear adds $50 to the price - and I spend that money whether or not I ever buy the item. Every hour I spend reselling shit (listing, corresponding, packing, shipping) does the same. Your hourly labor rate (or, whatever rate you value an hour of leisure at) may be greater than $50. My billable hours sure are. But I use $50 because it's a large enough amount that it makes me pause when I start to get obsessive, waste too much time, or start to think about selling a piece of gear that I have to fund something I don't.

5. Satisfice. Don't know what that is? Look it up and realize that it's a valuable life skill that should be applied to all but the most mission critical aspects of your life. (Spouse, residence, family, profession are all mission critical. Most everything else isn't.)

 

For me it's a matter of whether or not I'm happy with what I have. Recent purchases have me very happy to just listen to all my music all over again for the first time. Both my speaker and headphone systems let the music sound fantastic to me. I'm content. I still want read and exchange info with people sharing the same hobby though.

 

Every person's journey is different. Luckily, I got into this hobby when I had already left my pretty good job to go back to school to get a Master's degree and didn't dump too much into it. Then I decided to do the entrepreneurship thing. Being forced to live lean did keep me in budget/mid-fi purgatory (whirlpool of side-grades) for a while, but it also kept me in check by forcing me to think value (sound and $) over all else - not what was best, but what was best for me. I went to as many meets as possible so I could hear all levels of gear, and I was able to find the point of diminishing returns for myself and have focused just on streamlining. Rediscovering the HD650, and LHLabs releasing the GOv2 saved me from a lot of angst. I have heard my own tracks on my own HD650's out of a Yggdrasil/Rag stack, and it was sublime. But doing the same out of the balanced out of the GOv2 gives me enough of the sublime that I am happy to not have to spend the extra $3900 to be happy. I started going down the rabbit hole with photography as well, but found that I valued portability and ease of use over the last 10% of quality or the art of photography, so went with a Sony RX100IV and couldn't be more pleased with the pictures and videos that I have been taking. It has been freeing to find good enough. I hope everyone who feels more angst than they think is necessary or healthy can find their own good enough.

 

If you are really trying to save money and still lust after good gear, BUY USED!

It is kind of like buying cars, new gear in this hobby can take a substantial value hit the moment you open up that box. Also the more expensive the gear the bigger the value hit.

If you pick up gear used gear at market prices then you can almost always get most if not all of your value back when you decide to move on.

 

i usually just end up giving in to mine sadly, recently bought a iusb3.0 and gemni cable just out of pure curiosity also due to the power thread on here bought an emotiva cmx-2 and cmx-6 for sanity sake

$800 worth of potentially 0% audio fidelity increase

woot woot audiophile nervosa

where i generally draw the line though is voodoo and magic that makes no changes in measurements or lack any conceivable scientific reason yet claim audiophile nirvana

note*

any sort of hiss/noise in background drives my ocd insane, I need dead silent background period. The iusb 3.0 and it's ground isolator trickery really does work nice, I use a beefy computer with SLI graphics and I'd get some whining noise coming off the ground from USB when any workload was put on the gpu, with the iusb 3.0 I have none in comparison to the wyrd (Yggdrasil as dac)

 

"Or, wackier, learning to fly a plane and getting your pilot’s license."

Been there, done that (see picture to the right). So now I have a single engine retractable gear aircraft and can go places much faster than by car, but...

• But if I had a twin, I could get there FASTER
• If I had pressurized turboprop, I could fly above a lot of weather
• If I had weather radar... you can see where this ends up

And when you're talking planes, they can start making even exotic cars look more reasonably priced.

Basically, anything you love to do can just suck you right in

Rob

 

I just read Schiit Happened and find Purrin's posts whenever I get itchy buying syndrome. Do I want it? Of course, but do I need it? Nope.

 

well I guess you arn't #feelingtheburn

 

Headphone gear is so easy to tuck away. You can buy more and more and it doesn't really become obvious until your collection of boxes starts spilling out of the closet.

For me, on the flip side of headphones I've got a bad habit of acquiring pro audio gear since I help run sound for some local studios. As a partial way to deal with this, I've convinced myself that bigger and heavier is better (partially true anyways... shhh, don't tell me otherwise). So with these, it is literally a physical limitation to stop me from buying more. Some awesome cheap subs on the used market? Great, except they're 120 lbs each and my back hurts just thinking about it.

 

I've found this to be extremely true. Not necessarily nice on the wallet, but more gentle.

1. Listening to your own stuff you designed and built is so very deeply satisfying
2. You learn so much about all of the things relegated by many to "magic" that much of the "summit-fi" gear starts to look less and less attractive because much of it (or at least its marketing) is total wankery.

 

I have OCD. I wash my hands until they bleed!

But seriously I've learned not to side grade at all. HD 650 will be my primary open cans for a while. Magni 2U until there's an actually better solid state amp I can fit on my desk and replace easily if I fry with beer. I'll try a ton of stuff and maybe get some of those Sovtek tubes but I'm not looking to constantly sell and replace my desktop headphone rig.

 

I think for me, it's about being honest with myself. Before Changstar/SBAF, I dabbled a lot in FOTM portable headphones/IEMS. I was essentially side-grading over and over. The justification of owning different "flavors" didn't work either, I would spend 99% of my time listening to one headphone and ignoring the others. So I sold everything except for one set of IEMS and used the money to help buy the HD600s. I really, really like them. My lack of funds holds me back from being too extravagant, but acknowledging that I'm a one-headphone kind of person also helps with a lot of the temptation. Posts like this are also very helpful. It's much more efficient to save your money for significant increases in sound quality rather than squandering it on endless side-grades.