Law of Accelerated Returns

My advice to those who continuously spend lots of time and money with fuses and tweaks and the like always looking for something better or different, that money would be better spent invested in acquiring and properly setting up a good pair of wide dispersion/omni speakers. Then you truly have something new and different to compare.

 Priorities must be set. For me the time I spent, not so much the money, was the downside in developing a high end audio experience. Assembling synergistic components in a sound friendly environment is a major commitment which takes many of us many years to accomplish. What I find sad is the I time lost after this had been accomplished listening to  my 'audio system' that I could have more profitability used  simply learning about and enjoying the music it could produce. That excellent system's sound became a major distraction because of the inclination to think that I could improve its audio aspects. I kept listening to the 'audio', music was important but truly not so much. My solution, and it seems to have worked, was to  purposely dumb down my system down a tad. Now there is no doubt that I could  improve, or at least change, it but I'm confident that what I hear tells me all about the music that I need to know. And I hear it and can ignore the call of the wild!

Sometimes when I hear super expensive systems I don’t enjoy them as much as less costly ones.  Other times they blow me away. But it’s interesting how some systems move me while not costing more than a new car.  

I think the law of accelerating returns applies to those who have developed an appreciation for the difficulty in making progressively smaller improvements, so they notice those small improvements and realize the achievement they signify. Their senses are tuned in. They really care about the subtleties and get great satisfaction from them, so much so that they perceive them as not subtle at all. I fear sometimes they perceive them even when they aren’t real, or are confused by some other facet being out of adjustment. Just the notion that something is better can create a changed perception for those who are hyper tuned. Such tastes can be a curse or a blessing. I speak from my own experience.

Sure, SOME of it can be due to an increased appreciation of subtleties, cultivated over time in this hobby. But also, we each have completely custom systems with complex electrical, acoustical, and mechanical interactions. This makes for LOTS of potential performance bottlenecks. If you upgrade poorly, you will not properly address these bottlenecks, and you may exclaim "diminishing marginal returns!". If you do this for a while and then finally address the most significant issue, you may have a revelatory experience and exclaim "ACCELERATED returns!". There’s truth to both sides. But like I said before, I feel the hand of "diminished returns" is overplayed online - so what are we supposed to do, give up and try to force enjoyment of diminished system performance? That's too lazy and passive for how I prefer to approach this hobby. 

The "diminishing marginal utility" law is Economics 101, where everything is grossly oversimplified so that it can work nicely with infantile mathematical models. The real world is much more nuanced and complex than that.