The Absurdity of it All

I get the frustrations of this hobby.  The biggest obstacle these days is just being able to hear the gear somewhere.  It's not like the 70s and 80s when hifi shops were as common as CVS.  It's hard to optimize a system with limited opportunities to test and try various components.  I just revised my stereo system a few months ago.  I am absolutely enjoying it and focusing on software now.  The music is glorious and some days makes my eyes wet and some days gives me goose bumps.  And yes, there are days that it leaves me lukewarm too.  The music is the same but state of mind varies.  It took every bit of 5 months to revise my system and since I just retired it allowed me to focus much of my time on this hifi project.  I do not change gear often- about a decade or more on average.  This project started with a 2+ hour trek to a high end audio store.  I could easily hear what I was missing.  So I budgeted a good sum of monies and started the journey.  The difference this time was not having to decide between food for the month or a new turntable, preamp, etc.  I listened and researched.  It was quite the effort with some unexpected great successes and a few failures.  The key is time and effort.  Like someone else said, "if you cannot easily tell the difference then go back."  Once I get to a point that I am satisfied I am able to forget about the gear and enjoy the music.  Making decisions about what gear to buy or changes to make is exhausting and stressful- like a building project.  Once finished it is satisfying to have it and use it.

@stuartk, sorry about my delayed response. The visceral sensation is created by frequencies below 300 Hz. It is in this region that room acoustics cause the most trouble. Go to a rock concert at a large indoor venue and you get very powerful one note bass, boom, boom, boom. Go to an outdoor venue and you get beautiful bass. However, small indoor venues like Jazz clubs and larger indoor venue where acoustics were appropriately managed like Boston's Symphony Hall can give you wonderful sound.  But the small rooms we usually listen to our systems in literally choke the bass below 100 Hz. Getting these frequencies right requires clever acoustic management, a lot of power both amplifier and driver and digital room control. Very few if any speaker systems have the ability to produce bass accurately, they do not go low enough nor can they project that kind of power into a small room listening environment. I hear this all the time, "but, my speakers are rated to go down to 30 Hz." Right, at one meter in an anechoic environment. Put it in a room and you are lucky to get anything with verve below 80 Hz., virtually nothing below 40 Hz. If you try to correct these systems digitally they start distorting because they can't handle the power and many amplifiers just do not have the power to do it. To get it right you have to have a lot of subwoofer power and a lot of amplifier power. A point source system requires at least two 15" or four 12" drivers to do it with reasonable distortion levels. A line source system requires four subs 12" or larger. This will get you to 100 dB with low levels of distortion which is enough to replicate the visceral sensation you get at a concert in a room with good acoustic management. You can play a concert video and feel like you are at the concert and in many ways it is even better than a real concert. You get much better visualization of the musicians, the sound quality is actually better than at most large indoor concert venues and you do not have to deal with parking and crowds.   

cd318, what is going on is we are being screwed, all of us, every last one of us. Our money is being forcibly removed from our pockets and spent on maintaining political power and accumulating wealth usually to make corporations and certain voting blocks happy. We should all be fighting together to stop this. They are getting us to fight instead with each other. We need term limits and campaign finance reform fast before we become a police state. Humans need a reason to perform. Without that reason they devolve into apathy. The second amendment is not about guns. It is about keeping our government at bay. Watch what happens when they are not scared of us any more. 

If one talks about the ability to hear (hearing deficiencies) and the like...then that is something as important as any gear you might want to get. I think many people don't pay attention to that. Feeling is another subject entirely.

@stuartk, sorry about my delayed response. The visceral sensation is created by frequencies below 300 Hz. It is in this region that room acoustics cause the most trouble. Go to a rock concert at a large indoor venue and you get very powerful one note bass, boom, boom, boom. Go to an outdoor venue and you get beautiful bass. However, small indoor venues like Jazz clubs and larger indoor venue where acoustics were appropriately managed like Boston's Symphony Hall can give you wonderful sound. But the small rooms we usually listen to our systems in literally choke the bass below 100 Hz. Getting these frequencies right requires clever acoustic management, a lot of power both amplifier and driver and digital room control.

First point:  room acoustic can be controlled mechanically in a more powerful way than electronically...

Second point: i listen cello,tuba, and piano not heavy metal then over 40 hertz clear bass is enough and i have it in a 13 feet square room...I have a 52 watts amplifier, my sub is disconnected because i dont need it and any way only one sub in a small room is not ideal at all....

Third point no generalization are good.... There is different needs and different methods to reach a goal....

mahgister, how much experience do you have actually measuring room acoustics and correcting defects with both acoustic management and digital EQ? Do not tell me you can do it with your hearing because no one can even well trained mastering engineers can not EQ an environment by ear. They pull out the measurement microphone. I suggest you buy one. What you will see when you measure your system is a mess.
If there is an exception to my generalization I have not seen or heard it. 
When someone tells me they have "clear" bass that usually means they have almost no bass below 80 Hz. Because if you did without digital EQ the bass would be muddy and confused.