Happen to you? Gear chasing because the fundamentals were wrong.

I'm newer to this than most of you, but chasing wattage and not understand speaker sensitivity were the two biggest for me at first. Once I got that out of the way, the next revelation for me recently is the quality of DAC. A/B testing was a bit shocking. When I do upgrade, I could see myself stretching more for one than I would on an amp.

For me it is and always seems to be amp-speaker synergy and noise in the phono playback. I am learning a lot on this forum and it has helped tremendously! It seems when you match equipment it is so much easier. I purchased a decent phono stage finally with its matching power supply and it transformed my turntable/ cartridge playback (no noise) simply amazing. I now keep my amp and preamp choices to the same brand and it is getting better for me. I never had a problem with wattage because I never could afford a powerful amplifier. Now I have seen how efficient well made and designed speakers can play with much less wattage. I will say for a big set of speakers that are not Klipsch more power is pretty amazing in sound. The bass comes out and is powerful and no sub needed. So tight and great sounding. 

Apropos hearing loss, mine is age-related, not due to damage. I don’t go much beyond 12khz, which is normal for a male approaching 70 years. This does not affect my hearing or judgement of the midrange, which is where most of the critical musical information resides. I’d say my judgement of what sounds "real" to me is as good as ever. Maybe I’m missing some high frequency harmonics on cymbals or whatever, but it doesn’t detract from my enjoyment. The system is tuned to my taste based on all the factors I mentioned, including tube choice. Switching out a rectifier tube can make a difference. I can still hear little differences in tone. The system is not "analytical" or "bright" sounding- to the contrary, it is a little on the warm side without sounding euphonic (to these ears).

PS: where I have difficulty is in public environments, like a noisy restaurant with high ambient noise- where I can't even hear a dinner companion to hold a normal discussion. This has little bearing on the hi-fi, where the ambient noise of the room is relatively low. 

I suspect I only narrowly averted getting caught up in this trap! In the past year, I learned the vital importance of two fundamentals -- speaker/amp matching and speaker placement.

I messed around with speaker placement for months with little to show for my efforts before stumbling onto what appears to be an optimal placement. If I’d stuck with the rule of thumb that speakers should be located equidistant from one-another and the listening chair, I never would have found the right positioning and I might well have tried to improve the soundstage via a component upgrade. While that might’ve worked, it would have been an unnecessary expenditure.

I’d always assumed the sloppy bass I found so annoying with my previous integrated was due to the inherent limitations of my stand-mount speakers. It wasn’t until I replaced the integrated with a Hegel H390 that I realized my Silverlines were capable of much better bass and resolution than I’d ever imagined. Not only that but the Hegel seemed to "wake up" the Silverlines, overall. No doubt, the higher current was an important aspect, in this regard. If not for the Hegel, I would most likely have embarked upon a search for "better" speakers which would likely have been fruitless, given the fact that the weakness was actually due to the integrated.

In both of these cases, addressing the fundamentals yielded surprisingly significant rewards and very likely saved me many thousands of dollars.