Few learnings from my journey..
1) Components measurements a pack of bull.. Most component manufacturers stop with building the component, synergy and interop between components of other manufactuers may go to hell.. If measurements are the prime drivers, every component should sound perfect with every other component, which it doesnt. It is not even an aim. Every manufacturer will be least worried if you dont buy any component from other manufacturers.
2) Your electrical connection spoils the show more than room acoustics (atleast in India). You buy very specific high end devices and connect them to common purpose power sockets end of the day. Having an audiophile power and component cable combination that suits YOU (not your components) goes a long way and elevates components to multiple times their value, even beating components 2-3x their price.
3) Cables are necessary evil voodoo science. You can go mad trying to piece together a comprehensible idea on how some cable sounds the way it does a million times, but you always fail. A new cable comes along, could be cheap, bad in measurements, and still sweeps you off the ground and breaks you existing theories. It should be very taxing to be a cable manufacturer.
4) Your listening content does not change with your upgrades. Your upgrades could sound a million times better on 'test' material but if your go to albums dont sound the the way it did before the upgrade, it is a matter of time the upgrades kicks in. You cannot listen to test and demo material all day, it is like the 8k videos played in the TV showrooms to sell the tv, you will probably never see them later in your lives. I enjoy the same 100-200 albums all the time whatever changes. Every upgrade is still a bit of downgrade in some aspects.
5) No one else in the world probably has the combination of components you have at home (including components, settings, conditioners, cables, apps, routers, sockets, UPS, room treatment, positioning etc). Which also makes it extremely impossible to test all these combinations. The more components you have the more becomes the matrix of failure. 95% of combinations wont sound better than multimedia speakers if randomly put together. 5% will sound good to you but not to others. Only the last 1-2% of combinations arising out of weeks of tuning sounds good to you and in general. Good to have the opinion of a non audiophile (on their own set of albums) to ascertain performance.
6) If you directly wakeup and listen to your setup with default settings without brushing and you feel something is off, you are right. If you come from a 2 hour appraisal meeting and listen to your system and it does not calm you down, your system is off. No amount of accuracy or fluidity or other bullshit matters, it needs fixing.
7) When everything is working and you can sit in front of your system and can enjoy listening your favorite albums for hours any time of day with any mood, flickng keep your hands off the system. If you upgrade because one of the test record sounds bad or because there is a new component in town or just because you 'know' something is better out there, you are screwed for life. There ARE better things out there and chances are you are going to die without hearing them all anyway. Dont mess up the perfect combination you have for better combination you dont have.
8) You will be surprised to hear powered, volume controlled pro/hifi speakers. What you toiled hard to achieve in years with meticulous work and 5x money, these mid range speakers achieves in no time, elemeinates complex cabling combinations and what not. These are purpose built ground up for single purpose with best synergy possible for the price. Just throwing away the stock power cable and replacing it with the power cable of your choice can elevate and do wonders to sound for a fraction of the price.
9) Your hearing is not perfect. Atleast have the opinion of an audiophile friend and non audiophile (wife) opinion about how the system sounds. End of the day, your wife endures passive listening, it is better to sound good to her too.
10) A single component swap is almost always never going to stop with that and is going to trigger a chain of swaps over the months/years to come. Factor that in. More than that it is going to break the synergy that is built over the years. An audio component purchase is not like buying a tv, like you demo and bring home the best thing you saw in showroom. It is going to affect everything you have and is probably going to end up in classifieds.
