New paths

I have been doing a lot of learning lately, yet it is a strange kind of education, one that is changing my worldview of the system hierarchy without providing a solid foothold to stand on. That type of learning is unnerving to me. I am comfortable with the importance of the source in the chain of reproduction equipment, yet now question its hierarchical ranking. I used to agree with Linn's founder, Ivor Tiefenbrun, who said the most important element in the chain is the source; if you can't retrieve the information then nothing you do afterwards matters. That's a pretty solid argument until you realize it is accurate only in a vacuum, suggesting the corollary must also be true; no matter what you start with, if you lose it anywhere along the chain, it is still gone. A good example of this might be a relay race. The starting runner is the best in the world, but it doesn't matter if the finisher is the slowest. Truth is, we have to adjust our thinking to grasp the importance of every link in the chain and then assign some measure of importance to each so we can effectively maximize our limited resources. With the introduction of the new BHK amplifier in my system, everything in that system has now taken a different meaning than it had before and over the next few days I want to share some of what I am now learning; some of which may come as a surprise.