In listening to your system(s)...what is most crucial to your enjoyment?

 " a good recording can make a mediocre system sound great "

No way it can.

its cool to be verbally expressive, yet I feel life ingeneral is far more simplistic and few words are needed to actully convey what it is about a system which indicates it is doing what we want….

is the mouth open? if sitting, are the knees bobbing up and down with the music? do you not want it to stop? if the outfit is yoru’s do you look forward to turning it on?

those are what I look for as the end result which says, “feel free to exit the treadmill now:”

as for the shortest path to improving the audio fidelity in a stereo rig, I’ve always thrown my hat into the ‘SOURCE’ camp.

every substantial source upgrade has yielded the most benefits.

this indicates as well that all else in the system is already very good to excellent.

however, on average most folks do not own ‘destination’ rigs, and as such their rigs are usually in flux, if not entirely fluxed outright. I’m sure many of my former arrangements were in ‘process’ the majority of the time. maybe, always.

the front end first approach allows one to invest less in speakers too. its impressive what having $50K in front of $10 or 15K speakers can do! even with <$10K speakers the sound is ordinarily superb.

as for sheer impact, its gonna be all about the loud speakers specifically. make a major move there and things will change the most. everytime!

which way things change is the sole caveat.

I built my ($8k) system not to ’scale the summit’ by itself, per se, but primarily to avoid all the usual sorts of mistakes that I saw being imposed by manufacturers in the name of "costs", "practicality" or the "traditional approach" based more on what they see that people buy, not on what they might actually benefit from (I went open baffle [DIY] instead of boxed and with active [fully adjustable] electronic crossovers). Then I, too, started to dig down on improving what I had...noise floor reduction, EQ, delay, grounding, etc...and later this year will be adding a dedicated listening room onto the house. I've spent more on "tweaks" than I have on the system.

Right now, just a total falling away of colorations, lack of clarity, etc and everything here has taken such a complete step forward, that the "gulf" that has always existed between me and the performers has not just diminished, but has actually been erased.

Hopefully by the start of 2021, I think I will have just found my "exit".