First, sort out your speaker set-up.
Second, sort out the room, at least a bit. You may want to hold off on thousand-pound acoustic panels and bass-traps.
Third, get to know the sound of your new, improved music collection.
Fourth, work out what's missing or wrong with the new, improved sound. That will take a month or so.
Now you can think about upgrading.
UPGRADE THE SPEAKERS FIRST. (Says everyone.) Assuming your amp and sources are at least a decent mid-fi.
Look at what the professionals have in the background of their YT sets.
Almost all of them have had a pair of KEF LS50's on display at one time or another. Paul McGowan has a pair.
John Darko said that if you can get a pair of the originals (not the Meta) at a decent discount, that would be the deal of the year.
Guess what? Sevenoaks Hi-Fi are or were selling them at a 33% discount, with an effective 28-day trial period.
(Pauses to read debit card details over the phone.)
Two days later they arrived (and I still can't get anyone to look at double-glazing after a month).
I already know where to put them, so I swap out the B&W 686's.
Select Bruckner 5. Press play.
Holy ****.
The violins are on the left. The cellos are on the right. The horns are on the left and to the centre. There are instruments I hadn't heard before. I can play it louder without it being painful. And nobody in the orchestra gets up and wanders over to the corner of the room.
These things are so clear they even make sense, okay, almost makes sense, of Shoreline (7/4), which I swear was especially mixed to defeat the best stereo systems ever made. I could actually play that Broken Social Scene CD without wincing.
Bedrock's Signals became a shimmering, echoing delight.
I have Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony 1 playing now. Each instrument is distinct, each note has a beginning, a middle and an end. In that order.
The difference is about the same as the difference between a three year-old Ford Mondeo and a Jaguar XF.
Some things really are better than others.
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