sgreg1-
Question for some of the responses. Are your listening skills better in
hearing the tweaks? Or is the delivery making the sound better and your
listening skills are the same?
A little of each I think. Used to think it was entirely down to listening skills. Because in the beginning I was like a lot and had a very hard time hearing any difference between a lot of different things. Different systems sounded very different, sure they did. But between two DACs or CDP or sometimes even amps was hard to be sure. Then one day something clicked, and suddenly all those audiophile glossary terms fell into place, I could hear them, and talk about them.
When this first happened it seemed to me it was all down to listening skills. I even made a point of trying the same tweak in lots of different systems with lots of different components, different rooms, and always heard the same thing regardless.
I still believe this is largely the case. Recent experience however has forced me to re-evaluate and allow that there might be some times when for one reason or another something works but you just can't or have a very hard time hearing it because of something to do with the system. Hate to say the system isn't resolving enough, but that just might be it.
What made me reconsider was trying Townshend Pods under my turntables Verus motor controller. That thing has Synergistic Orange fuses in it, cones under it, a Shelf and weights on top. It is treated inside with fO.q tape and TC. It has a nice Shunyata power cord. It even has Active Shielding added to the umbilical. All these changes when done to all my other stuff each and every one of them was an obvious improvement. For whatever reason with the controller the changes were very subtle to the point I wasn't even all that sure some of them did anything at all. I was thinking this is the one thing impervious to tweakery!
Then recently I tried Pods under it and was surprised the improvement was easy to hear! Now I guess it could be that the controller with all its timing circuitry is so different that it responds better to Pods than anything else. Or it could also be my system has finally reached a point where something even as subtle as motor control is revealed. At the very least it has to be considered.
