@ghdprentice You suggest your change of TT produced better sound by 'an order of magnitude'. That is 10x better sound. Accepting each of us has different measurement scales I still find it difficult to align with that.
Perhaps it would be interesting to discuss the philosophy of according performance evaluation figures to what we hear. This has been vogue in the wine business for many years now but so far as I know has not been widely used by hi-fi critics,
On wine, Robert Parker who started it, has made a great deal of money and set himself up as the unchallengable authority. Many other wine critics have followed him. Most mark out of 20, but for some reason not using 0 to 10 (?not to be insulting).. 10 is massively faulty, undrinkable - I suppose think pocket sized transistor radios from the 60s. 20 is perfect. We are not told if the scale is linear or to some extent geometric. As a wine lover of many years standing who has consumed a few bottles rated 20 by some, my impression is that the scale might be linear or perhaps mildly negatively geometric, i.e the jump from 15 to 16 is greater than that from 18 to 19.
If there is to be a single marking system for the whole market, of course hi-fi is like wine in that there are many styles that must be accommodated by the critic and as far as possible treated even-handedly - super difficult in hi-fi.
Like evaluating hi-fi, wine tasting is overwhelmingly subjective and my take is to be sceptical about the usefulness of allocating marks to subjectively perceived quality levels.
Now don't get me onto cars. Jeremy Clarkson rates them out of 5, but uses half points at 3 and 4. I'm not sure I recall many 5s, although there have been a few 1s.