I never feel "tweaky" anymore. In my media room all you see is two 8 foot speakers, four subwoofers and a screen. No wires, no amps, no lights, no BS. I did the tweaky thing in my younger days discovering that in general it is just a hill of beans. I make my own cables using the best stuff available for a fraction of the cost. If I put some fancy sleeves on them I could sell them for big bucks and rip off gullible audiophiles. The very best "tweak" available is a Weber Soldering Station and some practice.
Another great "tweak" is the HiFi News test record. Guaranteed to make your TT sound better. A Conductive sweep arm and a tone arm lifter complete the package. Where are all the amplifiers? Directly under their respective speaker on a shelf hung from the ceiling below. Everything is run balanced. They are all triggered by a 25 volt power supply which is switched from the equipment cabinet above. It also runs 4 variable speed fans keeping the lot cool. The speaker cables are three feet long. The subwoofers are on spikes through the carpet and into the floor. The stats are just on the floor. There is no room to put anything under them anyway. There is a line of acoustic tile behind each stat. This improves the imaging by damping the reflection of everything over 250 Hz.
IMHO none of these things are tweaks. They are all practical solutions with solid explanations and rational. Great sound is not magic, neither is optimizing any system. I am certainly not a virgin. I have fallen for a bunch of stuff in the past. Many things are just visual or ego pleasing. Make things sound better? Only in your mind. Some of the stuff is literally comical like the Talisman Magnetic Optimizer. I almost wet my pants.
Another great "tweak" is the HiFi News test record. Guaranteed to make your TT sound better. A Conductive sweep arm and a tone arm lifter complete the package. Where are all the amplifiers? Directly under their respective speaker on a shelf hung from the ceiling below. Everything is run balanced. They are all triggered by a 25 volt power supply which is switched from the equipment cabinet above. It also runs 4 variable speed fans keeping the lot cool. The speaker cables are three feet long. The subwoofers are on spikes through the carpet and into the floor. The stats are just on the floor. There is no room to put anything under them anyway. There is a line of acoustic tile behind each stat. This improves the imaging by damping the reflection of everything over 250 Hz.
IMHO none of these things are tweaks. They are all practical solutions with solid explanations and rational. Great sound is not magic, neither is optimizing any system. I am certainly not a virgin. I have fallen for a bunch of stuff in the past. Many things are just visual or ego pleasing. Make things sound better? Only in your mind. Some of the stuff is literally comical like the Talisman Magnetic Optimizer. I almost wet my pants.