My system’s gear has been stable over many years.
I always thought my system just wasn’t capable of portraying large scale orchestras. Maybe the stand mount speaker with an 8” woofer and subs with 10” woofer was too small, or the room too large. (28x30x about 14’ high)
Maybe the cones were reaching break up, or the amp wasn’t powerful enough.
But over the last year I’ve done some minor upgrades. One being some inexpensive speaker cables from Underwood Hifi, (the diamond and gold, in Biwire application). I also cleaned the tube pins and sockets in my preamp which hasn’t been done in some time. The most recent addition was the $95 (for two) cat8 Ethernet cables I previously posted about.
Listening to the Rachmaninov symphonic dances on Athena Records 24/96 aif files tonight, I realized the system can now indeed do large scale symphonies. Sure maybe not as well as one of the large Wilson’s, Magico, YG, etc, but certainly the system is now in a new class.
Total cost of upgrades were about $750. I’d call that an accelerating return, or at least not a diminishing one. I could also throw the $650 EtherRegen added a couple of years ago in there as one of the upgrades, but still total, a very small percentage of the system cost that made a vastly better system.