Did your system getting better the more money you spent or more experience you gained?

Experience saves me money. Ultimately I can get better sound if I spend more but I have found there’s an upper limit to my ability to enjoy. Once the sound quality reaches a certain threshold I’m basically there, so no reason to push it further. Mostly what drives me to try new things now is just curiosity. What will it sound like if I do something novel? Even if I limit myself to moderately priced components, experimenting can get expensive quickly. And that’s where experience comes in again. I’ve learned to think more and build less. Think about every reason why I shouldn’t try something, and be as sure as possible there’s not a better way to do it before I actually start ordering stuff and cutting wood. Thinking about assembling a new system can be as much fun as actually doing it! Meanwhile I'm blissfully enjoying my current system, occasionally trying a minor tweak that doesn't require me to buy anything. 

@calvinj

I think I’m at a point where I’m good. Changing one thing can screw up my entire chain and sound now!

That’s a very good sign. I got there at my previous residence, at least in terms of setting up the equipment I tried. I’ll never know if other components I didn’t try might have done something even better but I was having a great time with what I had. The thing was, there was a LOT of digital settings involved and I was worried about accidentally messing it up, which happened sometimes, causing me to carefully and nervously go over everything to figure out what happened. That’s the good thing about using components that just sound the way you want without any special settings required.

My setup at my new house is quite a bit different, but still has a LOT of settings I have to make sure stay put. Fortunately there is no longer a front control panel that I or a toddler nephew can mess with and inadvertently screw things up.

@mahgister

I’m with you on the crosstalk reduction. I haven’t heard BACCH, but I’ve set up the physical crosstalk barriers and had my mind blown, and now I’m using my own 3 speaker array method to deal with comb filtering caused by interaural crosstalk. This is my main area of audiophile interest now. Interaural crosstalk is the 600lb gorilla in the room to my ears. 2 speakers playing across your head without some kind of electronic or physical hardware to reduce crosstalk is a seriously compromised setup for anything other than sounds panned hard left to one speaker or the other, and I don’t think there’s any way to correct it with recording methods or mixing/mastering - unless some kind of crosstalk reduction is mixed into the recording - which means it’ll only work in very specific listening configurations. Multi-channel recordings with 5.1 or 7.1 setups bring their own headaches, although I think those could be solved with a specially designed room, but only if the people who mix the recordings properly take advantage of what’s there. I know that many feel it’s a non-issue. Hence, Sonus Faber just put out a 2 channel speaker system for $750,000. You wouldn’t put that much into a system if you thought it was inherently flawed, I wouldn’t think.