What’s Your Best ‘Tweak’?

Finally tried rake angle on my speakers. My the sound stage just went big. Using Roons DSP for room correction.

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Dedicated streaming cables for wall-to-streamer connections.
Also replacing standard CAT6 patch cables (switch to a patch panel) with some good quality Chord streaming cables.

Colour-coding cables and connections in my tri-amped system part through use of 8 different colours of insulating tape, to wrap around each end of speaker cables, and create corresponding labels stuck beside sockets, and partly through making my own interconnects using Mogami cable and XLR plugs with coloured inset bands.

The benefit? Reduces to virtually nothing the risk of catastrophic mis-connection (e.g. bass amp to tweeter), while also making more manageable should anything happen to me in the future.

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I swear by Sorbethane! My old house had a suspended wooden floor. Putting Sorbethane feet under my floor standing speakers made a huge difference. The speaker wobbled slightly, but the floor no longer vibrated, and the sound quality improvement was huge.

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An annual clean of all the connections, including power and earthing pins with DeOxit. The results are simply stunning!

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Darren Class A serviced Naim 150x.
Get quadraspire rack - spike it thru carpet onto concrete floor.
Move the hifi/TV/furniture ensemble left a few feet towards audible centre of sitting room.
Mount speakers on their plinths - position them very carefully - spike thru carpet.
Dress cables.
Get Chord Epic speaker cables.
Use spare Powerline Lite on 150x.
Get Cisco 2960 and stick on 3 (or 4?) rubbery feet.
Replace free and cheap ethernet cables for BJC Cat 6a.
Position listening chair away from wall.
Start listening to better music.
And start listening much more intently (put down my iPad!)…

Not sure which one of these changes was the best.
But the ones that made the biggest improvement to SQ are highlighted.

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Great list! Thanks for sharing.

Do you lay one small “S” after another? How big are they roundabout?
Do you have a picture?

How exactly do you dress your burndies?

@D.L will take a photo over the weekend and post

on speaker cable I use Cord oydsesy which is a fairly thick cable, my right speaker is closer to my system thank my left so I just lay the right channel in an S shape behind the speaker

on Burndies - important for my 252 that it hangs in a nataural postion with SNAIC a close as possible and off the floor, I have a FRAIM so system is 252/NDX/300AMP/300PSU/SC - so the burndy for 252 very nicely just hangs and does not touch the floor

for the 300 just try and position the cables as they hang - the one bit of advice from my dealer is from time to time removed the burdnies crunch them and stretch them and put them back on system

cable dressing can be a little bit of an art but IMO worth that little bit more effort

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@D.L

My cord odyssey cable which I have in outer protection

Burndy and SNAIC for 252 just leave to hang naturally from 252 with SNAIC as close to burndy as possible

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The first was Mana supports, but more recently it was a cheaper tweak to do with speaker supports. For years I used Nordost Aluminium Pulsar Points under my Dynaudio floor standers, they sounded better than spikes in the floor to me - I was happy with the sound.
A couple of years ago my 250 went to b DR’d, in those days it took a while do b returned. During that time I used my early model Uniti 1 to listen to music. It sounded much more closed in and a bit ‘boxy’, not really surprising as I was comparing it to my 102/250. I spotted titanium Nordost Pulser Points going for under £200 in EBay, and got them. The affect was way above my expectations - the sound really opened up, the boxiness and closed in sound disappeared completely - while it still didn’t have the range of the 102/250, it sounded just as effortless.

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Mana sound stage(s) under my mana racks, a lovely cherry on top of all the other tweaks including mains spur, 30 amp ceramic fuse,hiline blah blah…
Oh and as HH said getting the sl2 setup correctly, that was a learning process. Even with all the information in this forum.

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Switched from Naim Powerline to Shunyata python power cable on my Nova

Just be careful - don’t step in a poodle.

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Without a shadow of a doubt installing an Aqvox se switch.

Removal of a Supra Lorad I had near my system.

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This type of Fuse was one of the cheapest and most effective upgrades…

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Not possible in UK - must be a residual current detector (RCD) circuit breaker

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I didn’t know that. Does that mean that all the old metal fuse consumer units have been (or by law should have been) replaced by now?

I noticed a spec of dust on the top of my Cisco switch so I removed it carefully and the improvement in sound was simply stunning. I was astonished at the difference it made, so much so that I have invested in an audiophile dust cloth, which I believe was developed by comparing different types of cloth and thicknesses.

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Don’t forget to polish in a North/South direction. :blush:

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