Cheap tweaks...What would YOU reccomend?

If you have dedicated circuts for your system try flipping every other breakers in your house to the off postion. You should hear a big drop in the noise floor and the soundstage will open up. The only problem is you will need to reset every clock in the house when you are done and of course you will need candle light. This is as cheap as it gets.
Pat

This tweek is not cheap, but it won't cost you anything either, provided you qualify by owning an unused pair of loudspeakers. It comes from some audio manufacturer, I forget who he is, and was published in Stereophile.

The tip is to placed an unused pair of loudspeakers in the corner of your listening room, behind the loudspeakers. I tried this with a pair of Linn Kan II mini monitors placed directly on the carpeting. It seemed to make a small improvement, though nothing major. After listening this way for a few months we had a minor plumbing related flood and I had to move my LP's to where I had my Linn speaker stands stored. In the process I moved the speakers stands into the rear of my listening room where the Linn's were located and place the Linn's on top of the stands.

This produced a nice improvement to image placement in the soundstage and also added weight to the presentation. Really very nice. If anyone is interested I could look up the article and elaborate on why this works. Let me know.

The Stereophile article I referred to above is found in the December 2000 issue on page 242. It is an article about port stuffing by Jonathan Scull. The originator of the tweak mentioned above is from Victor Tiscareno of AudioPrism.

Mr. Tiscareno states "...The acoustic effect of the woofers in the presure zones will cancel out some of the room-resonance bass-frequency nodes!"

I found this statement interesting because I once purchased a demo Michael Green Designs PZC (Pressure Zone Controller) and recall thinking this tweak sounded similar to the effect of the PZC. The demo PZC had been damaged in shipping and I had been meaning to replace it. Looks like a I can skip that plan.

Mr. Tiscareno also noted this tweak will work for some and not for others. If you have an extra pair of speakers lying around I recommend you give this a try.

Haoleb, you asked above if elevation effects your sound and the answer is yes. At higher elevation there are less air particles and since sound is produced by the movement of air particles, your amps will be working harder to get your speakers to produce sound at higher elevations. This is more noticible in the lower frequencies since the lower the frequency the more air that needs to be pushed. I have not had any experience with this myself but one of my collegues ran into this problem. Of course when this happened to him it was in Mexico, City which is pretty high up there so the effects may not be as noticeable say around 2k to 5k ft.

10 Vibrapods of #5 under each Speaker.(200lb speakers) .
The speakers may wobble for a few days but will settle in . It really makes the tonal quality of the bass notes clearer.