Most eye-opening upgrade and what you learned

1>. First exposure to tube amplification (1989). Bought home Dynaco st70 mk II, and my Infinite Slopes just opened up, and smoothed out. Rickie Lee Jones was in the room!

2>. Replacing Monster Cable Powerline 2 with AudioQuest type 4. Th AQ is nothing special, just that the MC is dreadful! No brainer difference/improvement!

3>. NOS/vintage tubes. Began tube rolling in my fisrt amp - GTA se-40 - and was amazed at the difference different tubes could make. To this day, my favorite and most productive means of tweaking my system!

4>. SET 2a3/45 amplification. Not as dramatic as the other examples, but no less signifigant. Its like another mindset, were your priorities shift. No longer are pyro-technics important but the nuances of the musical ebb-n-flow. Really another world, one much more sophisticated and real!

5>. AC/acoustical treatment. No, not a fine-tuning measure, but a fundamental process in building a proper system. And if you don't consider, you're just playing with yourself.

MikE

While I've made a number of upgrades and tweaks along the way to building a good system, the two upgrades that come to mind as truly "ear-opening" are (1) purchasing a pair of audiophile grade speakers (PSB Stratus Gold-i) to upgrade a quality mass-fi system. The huge increase in musical enjoyment bowled me over and awakened me to the possibilities of high resolution audio, getting me hooked in the hobby. (2) adding a Tact RCS 2.0 room correction processor to the system. The surprise here was not so much the delightful and substantial increase in focus, resolution, and smoothness of the sonic experience, but the realization that so much of what I thought was whomping bass capability in the system was actually muddy room reverb... bass drum hits changed from a big, meaty "boom" to a tight thump with microdynamics of skin reverberations. Bass guitar lines became distinct musical notes. The rhythmic underpinnings become so much tighter, so much more "there". Listening to clean bass takes getting used to... at first the sound seems thin, until you bypass room correction processing to hear the mud again.

After many years of being blind to it, I was looking at the cover of Peter Gabriel’s album “Up” just now and learned his face is on there. Who knew?