As so many have correctly said, it depends on what you consider a “tweak”. One person’s tweak is another person’s basic setup requirement.
I think correct racking and correct interconnects has entered the hifi setup consciousness as a standard requirement. Mains cables and distribution blocks less so. Dedicated mains or any change to your home is far out there in tweak land - but so many would scoff and declare it mandatory.
Based on that, my only tweaks are:
Mains cables.
Distribution blocks.
The use of ferrite chokes on DC power and digital cables both on the hifi and on anything that may generate common mode noise.
Some special feet under the UQ2 (because it doesn’t have a rack).
After market linear power supplies to replace the SMPS that shipped with the turntable and the streaming transport.
An NTT 500VA bi directional earth and mains noise supress block on the UQ2 purely because it shares the same block as all the office equipment. I’ll eventually use a higher wattage suppress block and put it on the office equipment rather than on the UQ2 itself.
I consider the above to be fairly pedestrian compared to what many people do. How the system looks does, for better or worse, matter to me and I try and make sure tweaks are invisible. There are some pics of systems where users have added so many extra little gadgets and boxes that the system is really only a beauty in the eyes of the beholden owner and otherwise a rat’s nest both front and back.
FWIW, I did lift the speaker cables on the Naim system. If done properly it can look tidy. I can’t really claim to have noticed a difference in performance. When it comes out of storage, if I could do it “gracefully” I would again. If it looks like crap, the minor aesthetic OCD would win over the audiophile OCD in my head.
The kit defines the tweak.
The more high end you go up ~ the more your going to want to “optimise” things so that it all ends up as close to what the designer intended.
If that is the aim then it would be most useful to know full details of how the setup (including room) was when the designer listened and gave the go ahead for production - and perhaps then tweak to match that,…
It was 1972 and I was the man who coughed up a quid in the dark cavern of a folk club. Pete Atkin was singing about a man try to find a beautiful, unknowable but unreachable beautiful woman. Or so I thought but was he singing about hifi upgrades and tweaks?
I’m the one you’ll meet after the one you know now
There’s no room inside here to show you us all
Your shadow burned white by invisible fire
You will learn how it rankles to die of desire
As you long for the beautiful stranger
Said the vanishing beautiful stranger
And yes I did go slow on the flyover back into town.
A decent rack, or stable solid base is for me a given along with improving the mains supply so ideally I aim for one plug fed from one MCB with thick conductors. is a given. I spend timing getting things level and stable with the racks, so I dont have to go back and re-do. I make my own mains cables that aren’t expensive but do use thick copper. I also experiment with felt and other feet, usually with pre amps CD and BR players. I also have a number of heavy duty earthing cables to ensure the signal ground is maintained better than might be the case just using interconnect. Any unit that comes with a Walmart SMPS gets a decent LPS. I also spend a lot of time sorting speaker position out and measuring the room to understand RT60’s and so on, adding suitable panels as required.
All of that I would see as basic set up. For tweaking I do a lot of reading and experimenting, swapping out power supplies, internal mods 99% of the time on non naim. I am in the process of tweaking the AV2 but only because there isn’t a formulated upgrade plan
I’d say spending time on really setting it up is well worth it, small or major modifications can provide big, small or no upgrade. Sometimes worse after implementing a ‘clever’ idea. But for items like 4k players transformational.
I also think the idea that systems sound exactly the same every day can trip you up, so making longer term progress is the best solution
PS Ive never tried cable lifters, not least because I see many pictures of stark reverberant rooms and rather silly looking wooden pilons holding snake sized speaker cables up. I’m not saying it will not work but I am saying the basic set up has been missed… a
That really is my aim with tweaking. Simply to allow my kit to perform at it’s best. To me this makes sense after bothering to invest so much money in equipment in the first place. I really wish it was just a case of connecting it all together and placing it on a table or whatever. Although it’s obviously possible to do this and still get decent results I know from years of experience that one can get so much more by taking a little more time and effort.
Where I think tweaking can start to become a distraction and a never-ending merry-go-round is when people use it as a way of correcting equipment mis-match problems. Taming an over-bright system for instance. in my experience this is never satisfactory. It can help, but it never really solves the issue. In such cases there is only one answer - change some of the equipment.
Yes.
I have a cupboard with an assortment of wooden, glass and granite shelves I had made, along with a drawer of various risers, cones and decouplers. All that I used to like using.
After a while I got to know what and how these things in combination were contributing.
A Nordost pulsar point under near the transformer and two other solid cones really helped to give a solid bass.
Four softer pods underneath the corners really helped to smooth out any sibilants.
Although during a listening session playing several albums ~ with varying presentation differences ~ I could never really relax into it. Always itching to get up and tinker.
I’ve been so happy since I got myself a proper decent support that things just simply sit on.
The difference, perhaps, between proper installation, and then ‘tweaking’…. But it is surprising how few people seem to include the room itself as part of set up - and that itself can be the cause of all sorts of issues that people then try to tweak out.
My view exactly.
I think a large % of box upgrades and ‘tweaks’ are purchased trying to solve/mask issues from the room without people knowing the room is the root cause. IMO this includes sub-optimal speaker positioning that closely ties to the room.
I confess that I never give any consideration to the room. Not because I don’t think it matters, but because for me it is a fixed quantity. Our system has always been in our lounge wherever we have lived and so must have the minimum impact possible. If I had a separate dedicated listening room then I would definitely be looking into various acoustic room treatments, but to be honest we both like having our system in our living room as this is where we are most comfortable.
I agree though that the room has a major impact on system sound and this should not be under-estimated. It is in the ‘make or break’ category for sure.
I don’t have a dedicated listening room and to be honest, would 't really want one. Instead, I have always felt it is best to get speakers that work well in your room and have in the past changed speakers because of this. I have added rugs to a wooden floor and played about with positioning, and rearranging the room to get a better sound. I would not want to start down the route of room treatments, mainly because most of the examples I have seen don’t look that good to my eyes. If and when I move, which will be sooner rather than later if all goes to plan, then I am hoping my speakers will still sound great in the new room with a bit of working out the best layout for system and furniture etc. If after trying a few livable room arrangements the speakers still don’t work well in the room, it will be a discussion with my dealer about what might work better for my budget.
The only thing I’ve tweaked is speaker placement. Other tweaks, like changing speaker cables and interconnects, have never been convincing enough to stay, but then I suffer from reverse expectation bias (i.e. I don’t believe they should make a difference), so it’s probably a self-fulfilling prophecy. Oh well, at least it’s a cheap affliction…
ATB Peter
