@lewm , We are actually in close agreement. I always have said that you have to control the acoustic of the room to the greatest extent possible before resorting to digital adjustment. You just stop before the digital adjustment. You should measure your system. I think you might be surprised. As for tweaks we feel exactly the same way. That money is much better spent on equipment and effective acoustic treatment. If any of it does anything it is miniscule in comparison. Whenever I get flowery, bombastic descriptions of the improvement "product X" made I dismiss that opinion out of hand.
Now as for my career. I am a board certified family physician licensed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
I started building Dynakits as a kid. I got so good with a soldering iron that while in high school I got hired by dBx in Waltham to wire the power supply chassis of 32 channel noise reduction units which I did for two Summers. In 1976 I traveled to Miami, FL for medical school. To help with finances I got a job at Luskin's Hi Fidelity nights and weekends as a salesman. It was a discount box store selling mid fi mostly but we did have some nice stuff like Revox and Accuphase. The big high end store was Peter McGrath's Sound Components. I got most of my own equipment there. A friend of my cousins (very wealthy) asked if I would set up a system in his new house which I did using equipment from Peter.
Other wealthy people heard his system and I started getting requests. I left the job at Luskin's and started working on my own. Peter gave me discounts on equipment which I sold at retail with an added labor charge.
I then got all my own equipment at salesman's comp. That for me was the jackpot. The final system I set up was the entire PA system at Flagler Dog Track. The old system started having trouble and needed to be replaced including the exterior speakers. Nothing like climbing through steel girders and trusses hanging from the roof of a huge grand stand. The electronics were up in the announcers booth hanging from the roof dead center. I had to build the main control console which fed 8 JBL amplifiers and controlled two R2R's, two 8 tracks, a radio, a TV and two microphones. Along the way I developed a relationship with Jim Strickland of Acoustat fame. I had Acoustat X's which I got through Peter.
They were very pretty but the enclosures were awful and resonated like crazy. I pulled the panels out and mounted them in a solid frame, covered it in grill cloth and mounted a 3 inch thick maple plate to the top and bottom then stuck them on top of two RH labs subwoofers. Peter heard it and dragged Jim over to hear and he was impressed. The design turned into the Monitor 4 and Monitor 3. Jim had this plastic base made that lifted the speaker 18 inches and housed the amplifiers which I thought was ugly but it was a huge improvement. A year later he switched to the Model 1,2,3,4 followed by the 1+1, 2+2, 3+3 and the monster 4+4. This was at about the time I moved to Ohio for residency. I wanted a set of 2+2s when I got to Ohio so Jim set me up with a dealer in Akron called The Golden Gramophones. He sent the speakers up there and told John Ashe the owner to give them to me at dealer cost. I think but I am not sure that Jim charged John less than the usual dealer cost. John and I became close friends. He got me a deal on my first Porsche, a 944 Turbo. Now that I had an income as a resident I only set up system's for friends. I always got the from John and he always took care of me even after I moved to New Hampshire until the store closed in 1998.
I hope that explains everything lewm.
