The Most Cost Effective Tweak


What is the most cost effective upgrade or tweak? What yields the largest return on investment (ROI)? What if you could spend no money and no time and yield significant performance increases? Theoretically, that would result in an infinite ROI!

So how do you make that happen? Stop tweaking. What happens when you stop tweaking and messing with your audio system constantly is that you let everything burn in and settle down. Go read one of the many threads on this website that talks about how long it takes for components and cables to break in. The answers range from a few hours to several days. If you are suffering from constant upgrade-itis, you never let your audio system fully burn in. You’re robbing yourself of free, infinite ROI. And you never truly hear what your system is capable of. I’m not saying don’t upgrade your system. That’s a lot of the fun. Just give it some time and let your system burn in and open up. Reassess where you are at and where you want to go next.

Due to reasons I won’t go into depth on right now (mainly power issues), I am temporarily using a relatively cheap, high power, class D amp. I wasn’t thrilled with this setup and wasn’t sure if I could even call it’s sound signature high end. Due to a busy schedule, I have not had time to upgrade anything or even pursue simple tweaks. As a result of that, I have witnessed how the amp and my system have burned-in/settled down - whatever you want to call it. The sound was initially on the thin side and had harsh treble. Now the soundstage has become huge and the sound has become very smooth - smoother than I thought class D was capable of - especially from a class D amp that isn’t really something to write home about.

My point is that I realized significant performance increases by doing literally nothing. And now that I am hearing what I believe is the true sound of my system, my next tweak or upgrade will be more effective because I can clearly recognize where the weaknesses are at instead of making judgements while things are still burning in, which is often the case with upgrade-itis.
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@ Ozzy...Is there a thread I can read on the NPS 1260 on its effects on their systems ?
I had to update this tweak these Jupiter-Mundorf-Ultra Loudspeaker-System purifiers filter all the high frequency crap 💩 
Noise that rides there, the 1st 50 hours a small improvement ,now I have over 100 hours it’s truly opening up more depth and realism of instruments,even my streaming
has more realism and impact. And 200 hours is the mark for full runin .just hook them up to speaker terminals ,for under$400
a bargain IMO ,two in my audio club that have had these a month 
told me they got even more refined👍

bobby1945, in my office we use a Water Pick with warm water and peroxide. You do have to know where you are aiming so not a good idea to try on yourself.

1+ aewarren, lights off, eyes closed. A little rope doesn't hurt either.

Speaker placement is not a tweak. It is basic system setup. 

1+ secretguy, the physiologic term is accommodation. 

Is acoustic management a tweak? If you are actually measuring the room I think not but I suppose the measurement microphone and program are a tweak as they are not commonly purchased. It always helps if you know what you are doing. Also, once you know what you like you can quickly achieve similar results in many if not most other rooms. 

yugebohner, I would think coating your significant other in contact cleaner would be more fun.



Speaker placement is important, very important, but getting it down to a fraction of an inch is a wasted effort. Unless you put your head in a vise your ear to speaker distance will vary by a lot more than that. I’m all for attention to detail , but this is why those Wilson speakers with micrometers to adjust angle are so silly. If the speaker adjustment is many, many orders of magnitude more precise than your ear placement, it is a wasted effort.

Wilson says they can adjust down to .000002 seconds. That is about .0002 inches. Move your head a 1/4 inch and you are over 1000 times less precise than the speaker is.  Impressive, but again, a waste of time (pun intended). Or, some may say it is just marketing hype.