I suspect that playing with different brands is similar to rolling tubes were the result can be "different" as much as "better" or "worse" in a lot of cases.
I agree. Different but not necessarily better is something I’ve found frequently. Recently I changed my TV to a big 75" flat screen, which is located smack between the speakers. I was very concerned about how it might change the sound. It did change the sound, but in a way that seems as natural as before. The bass response needed to be adjusted. More recently I experimented with putting absorption behind my tweeter horns as I suspected that sound was diffracting from the horn mouth and going around behind them. This created a much stronger measured effect than I expected at the listening position, with the lower end response of the horn dropping off, and early delay times in that range also coming down quite a bit. The spectrogram analysis looks very clean. I didn’t realize how much of the later reflections were emerging from the surfaces directly behind the horn. Now that I’ve re-equalized it the effect is obviously not as noticeable. It’s a bit more refined but as I get used to it the improvement seems less important. It’s just business as usual. So that’s another issue with upgradeitits - the improvement is more exciting when it’s new. If it’s getting rid of something really bothersome than that’s definitely going to improve long term satisfaction. But if it’s something more subtle that wasn’t bothering you before but is noticeable, the satisfaction of the improvement itself fades over time. Whatever this absorption did is something nice that I really didn’t need to enjoy the music. Am I enjoying it more now, or is this again just something different? In a way it’s just something different. Some early reflections don’t always sound unnatural. They add a little vibrant effect at the expense of some fine details. This sort of thing happens in real life with real acoustic instruments in real spaces all the time so it doesn’t come across as wrong sounding, at least to me.