I don’t know that it’s heresy. I’m relatively early in my audiophile hobby / obsession journey (leaning obsession but not sure yet) but what I’m finding so far is YMMV is more true here than most other interests. Your speaker experience is a good example.
What you experienced is obvious differences I suspect most would hear if they’re paying attention. But many if not most discussions / pissing contests are about stuff that may not be so obvious if you’re inexperienced, your setup is incapable of revealing the subtleties, or you’re simply deaf to the differences.
I’m still building out my system and room but what I’m experiencing and learning about myself and setup already has me thinking of scaling back to a good integrated paired with a good DAC. I’m not ready to throw in the towel but I think the subtleties of separates, cables, and fractions of inches and degrees of speaker position and toe in are mostly lost on me.
That in part is what makes this thread interesting to me.
It's funny, in a tragi-comic sort of way. The YMMV aspect of the hobby (I don't know why, but I dislike that word, hobby; I think it wounds my sense of self-importance) ought to bring with it a measure of relief, that there is no absolute
should to our responses and preferences, and that what we like (the whole trust your ears mantra) is the true arbiter of what is, in a practical sense, good. But, for me at least, it's nigh on impossible to not get caught up in believing there is something better, and that, within our means, and sometimes beyond them (he said, shamefacedly), we should do all we can to bring about that better, that our listening experience, and, by extrapolation, our very life, will be improved by it. Part of this thinking on my part is fueled by my experiences with, as revoltingly pretentious as it sounds, writing, art, music, and wine. We've all heard the pronouncement at one time or another "I may not know art, but I know what I like." Well, okay. But contained within that pronouncement is the admission that you don't know art, and that, if you did know art, you might choose, understand, be moved by something entirely different. To me, there is something of the "I may not know, but I know" formula in "let your ears be your guide." Take the snobbery out of it, and the fact remains that a better trained eye, a more developed palate, a more educated and discerning ear, will both make one more critical and increase one's understanding and appreciation. There are sommeliers who can, blindfolded, identify type, grape varietal, year, and region of a given wine; it was said, and I believe it, that Toscanini could pick out the one instrument in an orchestral passage that had played a wrong note; a sophisticated reader will be able to recognize and explain, on a technical level, why a sonnet by John Donne is superior to any limerick. In the same way, I have no doubt there are those who can hear and identify the virtues and shortcomings of a given hifi setup and know where those shortcoming lie and how to remedy them. All of this I offer by way of illustration that, while our ears, possibly, should be our guide, our ears are also, at least potentially, capable of improvement, and, issues of cost aside, is it not better to train our ears to prefer a higher, more detailed, sonorous level of sound, so that, as with literature, music, art, and wine, we can elevate our experience, and thereby increase our enjoyment? Some say that understanding robs a thing of its magic. I have never found this to be the case. In my experience, the greater the understanding, the greater the enjoyment, the greater the amazement. So, in the hope of realizing the greater, or even only slightly better, of all those things - the room, room treatment, tonearm, cartridge, speaker cable, power cord, tube rolling, etc - the conundrum persists: to tweak or not to tweak. I suppose this is where an honest embracing of the injunction know thyself comes in. If one is certain one has attained one's listening apex, then that's it; no more searching, only listen and enjoy. But if one remains in the throes of the siren call of potential, that ever-unknown yet endlessly projected quantity, then the search will probably continue.
