Tweaks you got rid of because they were not effective (enough)?

Tweaks are exactly how you build a great audio system. I would even go so far as to say you cannot build a great audio system for any amount of money, it simply will not be great without tweaks. Sorry. You can build an expensive audio system without tweaks. You can even build an impressive audio system without tweaks. But you simply cannot build a great audio system without tweaks. 

Here in Seattle we have a system with over one million dollars worth of Wilson, D-Agostino, and AT. Very impressive. It probably could be a great system. But it has no tweaks. And so it is not as great as mine, which cost less than the sales tax on theirs. 

Please see my System page. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 There are many tweaks, not all equally effective but to take just one of the more average ones, cable elevators, everyone notices the sound field collapse when they are removed. The same or similar will happen if any of the many other tweaks are removed. Remove them all, I would not even want to hear it. For sure I would not be bragging about it. Minus the tweaks it would be merely another system, down there with the systems of all you who think tweaks aren't how you build a great audio system. 

For going on 30 years my reference standard for cones and footers was Black Diamond Racing. Still love the Shelf and Round Things, but almost all the Cones have been removed for Nobsound springs. 

The springs do require some adjustment. The sound varies a lot depending on the number of springs for the weight of the component. This is a drawback if you want something simple, but a big plus if you want to be able to tune the sort of sound you want.  

So BDR Cones out, Nobsound springs in.

Took me a while to catch onto mahgister, but once I did my understanding of what he calls "embeddings" is correct and proven by being exactly what I have been doing because it works, for going on 3 decades now.

The things we’re talking about, we really only understand them well at a very simplistic level. No one really has hardly any idea why one thing makes the sound deep and wide and real while another is flat and lifeless. Anyone can hear the difference, its predictably explaining why and how to do it where we get hung up.

I have compared our current understanding of electricity to something like the way a cave man knows fire: fire hot. Fire burn. Fire cook food. Fire hot.

We know enough about electricity to put insulation around stuff to keep it from shorting out. That’s about what we know. Why do certain insulators sound better than others? We have some ideas. No one really knows.

What is really going on with all this constantly changing electric field, anyway? No one has a clue. If they did then it would be easy to see why painting some paste on the outside of a wire makes the sound so much better. Sorry, be nice to tell you all what I’m talking about, but the Hateful18 et al make that impossible. Just know there’s good reasons why people who have heard my system are so impressed. Its not the components. Its the tweaks. Like paint and paste on wires.

That’s just one aspect of "embeddings", electricity, electric fields, whatever you want to call it. Its for real, and anyone can test and demonstrate this reality with something as simple as suspending speaker cables above the floor with paper cups or rubber bands. That absolutely zero of the people who will argue this point will bother to try this simple experiment tells you everything you need to know about them.

Another "embedding" is acoustics. If someone said GIK everyone would race to see who could prostrate themselves and brag how great it is the fastest. But mahgister says "embeddings" and uses bottles and stuff and everyone rolls their eyes. This again tells us more about them than mahgister.

The third "embedding" is vibration. Everything vibrates. Everything. Run a signal through a wire, just a plain old wire, the wire vibrates. Has to. Because the signal is electric, it produces a magnetic field, it must therefore interact with all the rest of the world. All of which is covered in electrons. Your skin holds together because of electron shell bonds. Speakers and air move in waves because of electrons.

Its kind of arbitrary whether we call one of these acoustic and the other vibration, or the other way around, or lump them together. The point is the only way to know is to try, and that means listening and evaluating.

Mahgister seems to have done an awful lot of listening and evaluating. He’s actually tried a lot of this stuff others totally dismiss. I wouldn’t be too quick to disregard what he’s saying just because the language or concepts are unfamiliar and hard to follow.

Not that effective? Too many cones and footers to recall, let alone list.
Probably the most over-priced over-hyped is the Shakti Stone. 

With others, cost-effectiveness is everything. Ordinary laundry anti-static spray doesn't make a big difference, but doesn't cost hardly anything so is well worth it to me. Ditto painting CD (back when I listened to CD, yikes, that was long ago!)  

Tube dampers not only don't work, but actually made the sound worse.