What was the most impactful addition to your system?

Like @ghdprentice, my buying a house that had an unexpectedly good listening room was by far the most impactful addition to my system. And it took me about 8 years of living in our current house to figure that out. Right before COVID, I convinced my wife to take the big flat-screen TV out of our bedroom that is roughly hexagonal in shape with cutouts on two sides of the room (where our queen sized bed sits and opposite from that).and about 20 from wall to wall. There's only one 1st order reflection that I managed with a 2 inch acoustic panel. After that one tweak, my room is one of the best sounding rooms that I've heard anywhere.

Getting a Pontus II is up there in value as well.

Conrad Johnson Art 150 Stereo Amp. Brought everything to life with good detail, solid mids and bass. 

My Chalice Audio 'Grail' SET monoblocks..by far..and I have Tidal Audio Contriva Dicera-SE speakers..

I am thinking about this on more of a macro level comparing speakers, amp & preamp.  I have Wilson speakers and Audio Research reference electronics.  I had a couple service events recently where I used my backup B&K preamp and amp.  They were each used separately and while the sound was definitely not on the same level as ARC, it still sounded damn good.  I had Platinum Audio speakers for 15 years before getting my Wilsons and the move from B&K to ARC was huge.  I got these Wilsons about 3 years ago and have loved their sound 100% of the time regardless of source or album.  To me this says we should find the speaker that connects to us and just sounds 'right'.  I never used dealers or went to demo but am thinking this would be the best approach to find the speakers, bring them home and then build around those.

I recently got a really expensive pair of another brand speaker that received grand praise in Stereophile but simply did not work for me like the much older and less expensive Wilsons.  

My advice is that one should invest in speakers before spending thousands on tweaks.  Save those thousands after you take your speakers to a new level.  

@wfowenmd 

In nearly twenty years of hanging out at Audiogon I can’t recall ever browsing the Best Of category. So I kinda stumbled on to this thread.

I want to simply say that like you adding a pair of subs has been the most impactful addition to my system. I tried a sub about 12-13 years ago and it was a failure. Could have very well been operator error but it was awful.

So with hope and some trepidation I decided to give subs a go again and added two to the system. It has been a complete success. Besides going with two subs this time and placing them next to the speakers, setting the crossover at 80Hz may be on of the biggest helps in achieving what I believe is excellent sound.

Glad you have found satisfaction with subs in your system and like you I wish I had tried this years ago.

Cheers,

Scott