Charles,
My specific audio goal is to make the music as enjoyable as possible to me, within my constraints of budget and room parameters. Obviously many factors figure into designing a well organized system, and many of us have certain restrictions to work with.
After many years of playing, I am now of the mindset that all of my goals cannot be accomplished with a single system. Since so much depends on the quality of the recording, and the genre of the music. Trying to find just one system that will perform best with all types of recordings/music has lead me to believe that one system simply cannot do it all. Perhaps if my musical tastes were more limited, this would be feasible.
I have been to the home of other audiophiles who are fortunate enough to have 2, 3, or even 4 systems. Ones where they can adapt different systems for different types of music as well as different quality of recordings. SET/Horns for small intimate quartet music, large dynamic speakers driven by solid state amps for large orchestral/rock music, etc., etc.
In my opinion, this would be the way to go if I had the rooms/money. Unfortunately I do not. So I try to balance one system the best that I can to suit my tastes, which vary from rock, jazz, blues, classical, and more.
A difficult, if not impossible task.
I would say that I am not satisfied with my system in it's current iteration. I recently changed my front end analog and digital components, which of course requires more tuning with cables/cords/fuses, etc.
I am in the process of tuning the system now. I have done this several times over the decades. Hopefully, this time, when I finally have it all dialed in to suit the majority of the music I listen to, I hope to leave it alone.
Accepting that it is impossible for any one system to do all things perfectly is the first step to accepting limitations of a system.
The key is to not touch anything once you have a system performing up to your expectations. Once happy, do not change ANYTHING, not even a fuse. In my experience, ALL changes have ripple effects that may (usually do) require other changes to be made.
Cheers,
John
