I’ve made a lot of great upgrades to my system in the past year and a half and it sounds much more engaging, quiet, pure, and detailed than it used to. But a little while after making any of these changes, I forget what it sounded like before! For a perfectionist hobby like this, what a curse! Always chasing that next noticeable sonic improvement, despite the diminishing returns...
Who else struggles with this?
I’m the same, but I feel it a blessing. I initially hear a difference. Sometimes better and other times not, but my ears almost immediately adjust and I’m back to just enjoying the tunes.
Your remarks made me think that you only begins the journey ...
I myself remember that my system sound bad at the beginning...Not too warm or too cold, but simply bad....
I cannot remember like you each station along the way...I was not even sure if a change was good at the end or bad...Like changing the position of the ass on a chair after an hour...I was chasing my tail here...
But i understand now how the sound was affected and modified by vibration and resonance....Good way to start here....
How it was modified unbeknownst to me by the higher electrical noise floor...More difficult to adress....
How it was modified by the acoustical settings, how related with one another are imaging, timbre perception, soundstage, listener envelopment and source width factors... This is by far the most difficult problem to understand and solve...
In the beginning, lacking the guiding concepts, i characterized my firsts changes with a very simple vocabulary: warm or cold, analog like or digital like etc.... A series of limited oppositions and duality....
Now i know that these limited dualities are constitutive polarities and INTERRELATED phemomena and factors of perception which i can analyse and experiment with...
It is very important to takes the journey with the right concepts...
In audio you have the system parts, the electronic design synergy and compatibilities...
Then you have the most important: the way you will embed in their working dimensions,mechanical, electrical and acoustical your system...
What people called "tweaks" will not do it alone by themselves here....With "tweaks" especially those costly tweaks you can buy ready made, you can only go to a certain point all along the journey...
For the rest of the journey especially for the acoustical controls you must listen, think and learn... Learn basic concepts and experimenting...It cost me NOTHING by the way...I bought NOTHING....
Without that you will do what most did : upgrading with costly new electronic design or ready made solution for all, not tailored one for you...These partial solutions wont solve the central acoustical problem anyway....
Upgrading with a piece of gear is half the time a problem not a solution... When you have already basic good gear upgrading is only chasing the moon...
Way more important than upgrading is learning the way to embed rightfully what you already own...
And beginning here, it is no more the vocabulary of "warm" or "cold" or analog/digital that will help you...
It is not the vocabulary of the electronic design that will help to understand the sound quality but the technical vocabulary of acoustic...Read my sentence 2 times here....
Try timbre perception, imaging, soundstage, listener envelopment and relative source width...Study about these acoustical dimensions...
It is now necessary to think with our EARS....
I call it listenings experiments....
Here analog/versus digital, tube/ versus S.S. "cold"/versus "warm" exist no more like people oppose them with their limited understanding of sound perception dimensions....
This electronical marketing and reviewers discourse is now replaced by the more refined acoustical experience and concepts and their dimensions and interactions...
This was my way....
Heaven at no cost.... Trust your ears and learn how to trust them with especially experiments in acoustic....
