Has this ever happened to you?

After about 55 years of building, I am mighty close. I want to try some DAC’s, but I’m really loving my system.

I try to convince myself this is the system, this one is it…but it never sticks and eventually I’m looking for something new, better and exciting.  My wife says I’m at Nirvana, but she doesn’t understand 😅

Oh boy, I hope many of the assembled here are lucky enough to have a co-habitant with the hearing skills of mrs. xenolith. To wit: recently scored a matched quad of 1949 Sylvania flat plate 6BL7GT, generally considered the best sounding of the rather obscure, but excellent sounding, 6BL7 tube. So I swapped out the matched quad of 1952 Sylvania T-plate 6BL&GTA in our two-of-a-kind 2x6BL7 + 4xKT77 monoblocks. I thought they sounded great with the new flat plate tubes. mrs. x waited about a week before she gently told me that the...and I kid you not..."soundstage seems closed in". WTF! Knowing that I was running the best input tubes possible, I replied, paraphrasing ’honey, that can’t be, these are the best input tubes possible’. She smiled and said "OK". About a week later, I started to hear evidence of her claim. I told her so. "Let’s swap just one of the other tubes (1952 T-plates) in she says. "OK" I says. You guessed it, it sounded glorious! I had that ’this is what I’ve always hoped our stereo sounded like moments’. Did a little research and found a few folks who discovered the same superiority of mixing 1:1 flat plate to T-plate 6BL7. She was already a keeper at 40 years together, but WOW, she can still present previously unknown talents that make our life better. I hope some of you are similarly blessed.

@xenolith +1 to your honey.

I recently posted about the very large improvement I got with the Tesla powerwall installation. I was then told all I was looking for was "confirmation bias" as though the author was the only one able to distinguish valid improvement to my system.    I did play with speaker positioning parallel to wall after seeing the comments on one thread, but I had done that before with no improvements from before after. I only have a few degrees of toe in.

I did contact the manufacturer about positioning and they recommended trying the "tilt" of the speakers. They are dipole, 5' panels, so I tried 2, then 1.5, then 1 degree. At the 1 degree angle, I got new speakers. lyrics plain as day that I hadn't understood clearly before, imaging, and all the rest of improvements we all like to have.