Why we (often) upgrade the wrong things (first) and ignore the important things

My experience is that, in a non treated room with a less than ideal size, experimenting with cables, fuses, equipment isolation footing or just about anything other than changing a major piece of equipment, does not result in any significant changes in the sound. Doing it in a properly sized and treated room and I can hear a clearly noticeable difference in any and all experiments. Huge difference.

I find what he is saying to be accurate. For about 20 years prior to retirement, I installed acoustical treatment into various venues (lecture halls, class rooms, meeting spaces, churches, gymnasiums, auditoriums, etc.), In most cases it was to tame a highly reverberant spaces so speech was ineligible.  I can tell you first hand that you could throw all the money you would want at a sound system, but until the room was acoustically corrected, it was a waste of money. As he stated in the video, but in a slightly different way, you're only as strong as the weakest link, and a lot of times the weakest link is the acoustics.

Now that being said, once the room is treated, a system can live up to its potential. Acoustics seems to be one of the "voodoo"  items because it is not understood.

In the kind of work I was doing, it was a matter of simply reducing reverberation times from as high as 10 seconds in some churches, to 3-5 seconds in lecture halls. In the world of hi end audio, it is much more complex because you are dealing with imaging and sound stage, etc, and it doesn't take much to play havoc with both of the above and frequency response. 

I suppose it is easier to throw money at equipment because the spec's justify "improvement", whereas with acoustics, it is a gamble into the unknown.

+100 Just had to pile on and agree that Analogholic's content like this is some of the best in the YT-sphere - or anywhere else that I have seen.  He has a bunch of these covering amps, dacs, streamers, etc and they are all very well done.  They are a fantastic resource for anyone new or even somewhat further along in their audio journey (and probably great for self-identified 'experts' who might be willing to listen lol).  I cannot think of any youtube channels, magazines, shows, dealers, or forums where this info is distilled so well for this hobby as these videos he has put out.    

Thanks for sharing.  I hadn't seen him before but agree in general with his message. 

Back in the day, one of the equipment manufacturers (I think maybe Meridian but cannot remember) issued a slide chart that looked at amplifier power, speaker sensitivity, and maybe distance, and then rated the quality of sound that could be achieved by computing maximum SPLs where more was better.  It was sort of like this one (link) but made from board stock.

I am married to an economist.  Mt approach has always been using the marginal coat versus marginal gain approach.  Room treatments always begin after the initial system has been acquired.  Item auch as cable upgrades fall far down the list as you are chasing the last incremental bits if you began with decent cables.

My greatest improvement was upgrading my amplifier to provide my 3 series Maggies with enough current to make them shine.