How far Do You Tweak?

Strong believer in that many small tweaks lead up to a great improvement. Added lots of Entreq tweaks lately. Extremely satisfied with the outcome. Best upgrades that happened since adding 555PSDR to my 272.

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Well every morning I get up 3 hours before I go to bed unplug everything, clean all plugs after the cables have spent an hour in the freezer, establish my play list for the day, vac wash all the vinyl, demagnetise all the CDs, check the incoming signal strength on FM, reboot the system and allow 3 hours for warm up, green paper the TT cartridge and then inspect with microscope. First music normally played at 14:00hrs.

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Music by 14:00?ā€¦ā€¦luxury!

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You mean you donā€™t bother to dismantle and rebuild your system rack every morning to check the torque on all the fixings? Shame on you for being so lazy - you canā€™t be achieving anywhere near optimum performance.

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Unexceptable, you need to be getting up earlier so it available my noon time for the lunch hour. You need to incorporate a little discipline in your schedule and work ethic.

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Tweaking is great. Take a look.

And between them they led me to give up buying hifi magazines, having before that on average bought one a month for a decade or moreā€¦

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If his column in Hi-Fi+ is anything to go by, Jimmy is now the god of the superfluous hyphen.

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For me poor old Jimmy lost the plot when he advocated turning your speakers around so that they faced away from you towards the wall. I believe thatā€™s how he still uses his Impulse horn speakers. My guess is that heā€™s tweaked his system so much over the years that it now only sounds acceptable with the speakers so positioned!

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Heā€™s probably doing that because heā€™s not realised the speaker tetminals are out of phase. :rofl: Facing the wall is how he corrects it.

Until your satisfied.

At the moment my cables cost x2 more than my Nova.

That begs two questions for tweakers to ask themselves:

  1. What is wrong with their system that it doesnā€™t satisfy them?
  2. Will they ever be satisfied?

Neither question is necessarily relevant imo.

Every now and then something comes along that is simply interesting to try, if you have the opportunity. Out of curiosity or just because itā€™s fun. If anything, most tweaks are merely a change rather than an improvement. But sometimes they do work. Iā€™m currently auditioning a ā€˜tweakā€™ / upgrade from Chord that seems to fall in that category.

This has nothing to do with being unsatisfied or anything wrong.

I recently tried some ceramic/porcelain insulators as cable lifters for the speaker cables. They brought a nice subtle improvement to the sound. Cheap tweak.

My post was in response to @obsydianā€™s statement that I referenced, however it does appear that some people are never satisfied, always seeking more, so to them the question may be relevant.

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I donā€™t believe you need to necessarily be dissatisfied with your system to have an interest in tweaking. I think it is more a psychological state of mind that predisposes some of us to tweak and others not. For me this state of mind is somewhat transient and on a sliding scale rather than a binary thing. Sometimes I become a little, letā€™s say, obsessive about tweaking, other times Iā€™ll not touch anything for months.

I only tweak if something comes up that sparks an interest, and I only tweak for the fun of it and the joy of discovering a very cheap, or even free perceived uplift in SQ. I never tweak out of frustration - that is not fun. I also have to be in the right mood to tweak and have some time on my hands.

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I agree. I recently bought some Audioquest cable lifters for my Chord Epic speaker cables, not because I was unhappy about anything but just because I had the feeling that they may bring a nice improvement, which they did.

For me tweaking is just about putting the final polish on things. But I no longer get carried away with it. For instance there are any number of isolation platforms or feet that I could put under my equipment. But I prefer to just leave it alone on its Quadraspire rack. Iā€™m sure some of these things would improve the performance but I really canā€™t be bothered with (a) the expense, and (b) taking the trouble to find the best or most appropriate isolation for my kit. Too much effort Iā€™m afraid.

I donā€™t mind the odd tweak here or there if its relatively cheap and very straightforward to implement. Anything more expensive or involved - forget it.

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Isnā€™t tweaking an irregular verb?

I improve
You tweak
He or she fiddles/ changes/ ruins

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3.37 here

When you buy a new component, you expect and feel entitled to an improvement in the sound. But if you make an adjustment to the setup and that tweak is beneficial, itā€™s especially satisfying because (i) you did it with your own hands and (ii) you made an improvement without actually changing anything in your system - itā€™s almost magic. Some of the most satisfying and durable upgrades Iā€™ve made to my system in 30+ years have been low-cost tweaks.

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