millercarbon, your system is sick to say the least. Mind if I ask about your background or career? What allowed you to get so ingenius with the advanced and quite expensive tweaks??
Thanks. Appreciate the compliment. And the question.
The first book I remember reading, not counting the Encyclopedia Britannica (never quite read all of that) was Red Giants and White Dwarfs by NASA scientist Robert Jastrow. Since I had started with the Encyclopedia and since A is for Atom, etc, it was fascinating to learn where stars came from, how they formed and how mass is destiny. Stars fuse hydrogen into helium releasing energy and the rate at which this happens, how long it lasts, and what happens in the end is all determined by the initial mass of the star. https://www.amazon.com/Red-Giants-White-Dwarfs-Third/dp/0393850048 The school library had just gotten it in, it was 1969, and so I would have been 12 years old.
The next year I built a 6" reflecting telescope and started hanging around with Al George and the Tacoma Astronomical Society. Around this time I was riding my bicycle to Radio Shack listening to everything and learning about audio. By Jr high I had a pretty good stereo and a room with DIY acoustic panels and some time in high school built a Dynaco ST400 amp.
After college I built Roger Sanders ESL/transmission line speakers from his design in Speaker Builder. This was 1980. Then around the 90's, prime of life and with good income came a pretty decent period of time in which I went from tournament racquetballer to USCF Cat 3 criterium racer and RAMROD rider to accomplished marine aquarist, Porsche Club President and Driving Instructor, and builder/remodeler. That last part included designing and building my current listening room.
The listening room was my dream of a lifetime. Originally sucked into all the same vortex as everyone else I wanted a 5.1 HT system and so the room was designed around that. Only when I went shopping and listening turned out HT stuff is all crap. Absolute dreck. Not that I didn't try. Put a good couple years into the effort.
Then came Stewart Marcantoni, the best dealer I ever met. I took Stewart in when he first moved out here to the PNW and introduced him to the area. Stewart took me in and mentored me in high end audio. Thanks to Stewart I was able to experience more outstanding gear than most guys can ever dream of, and was introduced to Ted Denney (Synergistic), Caelin Gabriel (Shunyata), and was even able to attend CES as a vendor one year. I knew DJ Casser and was the Washington State dealer for Black Diamond Racing for several years. More or less obsessed with audio I demo'd BDR Cones in probably 50 to 100 different peoples systems, and auditioned systems at just about every decent stereo store along the I5 corridor from Portland to north of Seattle.
All during this time thanks to my extensive and wide ranging background in science and technology it was easy to separate the wheat from the chaff and the science from the bull. Or so I thought. Sometimes the scientific explanation really does make sense and work. But then again often times not. Stewart helped me greatly in this. Time and again he would play me some insanely good sounding cable and I would ask how in the world? And he would reply very blase, "Oh he puts some dust or something in there, I don't know..." Which honestly one time was true- Caelin really did put some dust inside a conditioner! I have a bag of it at home still!
So that is my experience, Cliff Notes version. All I care about is the sound- and since I'm not made of money, how to get the very best sound for the money. When I say in my System description that its based on the philosophy that everything matters and no one component matters more than any other, that's not hyperbole or cliche. I mean every word of it. Only my understanding of what is a component drills down to every diode, cap and inch of wire.