Tweaks, money pit or real value?

When I think of crazy tweaks I always think of “The Crazy Little Clock”.

I think the company that made that is still up to no good.

However, these days, I have been turned on to super valuable tweaks by participating in this Forum. All have turned out to give major and significant improvements to my system. Most have proven to be transformative.

QSA Yellow fuses, SRA platforms, NPS 1260, and most of all, Townshend Podiums. I can honestly say that the improvement with the Podiums is as significant or more than any component upgrade. Perhaps only surpassed by my speaker upgrade itself.

Tweaks work well when they are used as tweaks. They are literally the icing on the cake, and for that approach to work (the icing to do its job), you need a darn good cake for starters. Icing will not do any good to an inedible cake...

That is: Put the system together right, then the tweaks will help to fine-tune the sound. The money spent on tweaks, when spent right, is about 1-2% of the total system cost. That is, the tweaks can add up to a serious amount when the total system budget is 1M$, but they should be modest in price for a 10K$ system, and should be next-to-free tweaks for a low budget system.  Big mistake is to get the tweaks intended for a 1m$ system for a 1K$ total system... that's when snake-oil priests come and eat ya. ;

Now, cheaping out on a component and hoping for a tweak to replace a major 10K$ components with a basic one, adding a $300 tweak on it - that will not work at all.

Can't replace cake with icing....

Good tweaks are cheap and effective. Bad tweaks are expensive compared to the alternatives and some do little or nothing. 

Tweaks work well when they are used as tweaks. They are literally the icing on the cake, and for that approach to work (the icing to do its job), you need a darn good cake for starters. Icing will not do any good to an inedible cake...

I am pretty sure no costly "tweaks" can beat by itself alone a systematic method to do the mechanical, electrical and acoustical control of the system working embeddings in the house/room/system at low cost...

I know it because i did it...

And nothing will replace anything; vibrations3resonance  and high noise electrical floor and acoustic treatment and acoustic control are totally FOUR distinct problems to solve and the increase in S.Q. gained by solving each one of them separately  cannot be compensated even by all the other together sonically ...

And even "tweaks" at low cost like the Schumann generators or the ionization of the room which i added with success in my own room may appear to be AT FIRST  only " icing of the cake" but are in fact more than that: they add something completely unique to the sound quality, they are more than icing....I cannot eat my cake without them...

All that cost me peanuts, inspire yourself by LOOKING at costly tweaks, dont buy them, replicate them in your own way.... If i did it for many, then you can for some... I am not crafty at all...

I am a free thinker though....

😁😊