What to judiciously invest in next to improve SQ?

[David A]

There''s huge differences in quality between some recordings and Chesky recordings often have very good sound staging because of the way they're recorded and mixed whereas a lot of "mainstream" recordings as you called them are recorded very differently. Chesky tend to record in an acoustic space like a church with a simple microphone setup whereas many/most "mainstream" recordings are recorded in normal studios, often with artists in isolation booths, often at different times, on a multitrack system and those multiple tracks are then mixed down to stereo, often with a lot of manipulation along the way. That will make for differences.

You want well made recordings to sound great on a good system because they're the sort of source material should sound great. You can't expect less well made recordings to sound equally great and you can't expect badly made recordings to sound great. A good system lets you hear what a recording is,. It lets you hear all of the good things a well made recording brings with it and it lets you hear what's wrong with less well made recordings. In my view what you do is that you do your best to get the most you can out of the best source material you have and you let things fall where they fall with lesser recordings, some will be good but not great, some will be so so and some will quite possibly sound quite bad because they were badly recorded. The old saying about not being able to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear applies.

Regardless of how good or bad a system is, the starting point in my view is getting the most out of it that you can and that starts with setup. Even average systems can sound noticeably better than their owners think if they're set up properly. If you're trying to work out what to do to improve a system, setup is always the first thing in my view and if you've got a good setup and you can really hear what your system is capable of with what you've got, you're in a lot better position to work out what the best thing to do to improve the system further is.

On the other hand, if you don't have things set up properly and you're losing x% of what you could get from the system if you set it up properly then if you go out and spend money and make a change in the system you're probably still going to be losing roughly the same x% because of the poor setup and you may be spending a fair amount of money on a change that doesn't yield as much or any more improvement in sound quality as you could get at no cost if you simply got to work and started doing what you can do to improve the setup of the system you've got, and the work you do on that will continue to be beneficial when you do make other changes later on.