I can highly recommend Scansonics if you’re budget is not up to Raidhos. They are not on the same level, but are under the same umbrella.

I’m listening to them now, and they sound amazing!

Speakers make more impact than for instance a DAC. Your room actually makes the most impact. And you can measure that with REW and a mic.

You can exchange different DAC’s in your system and the frequency response doesn’t change all that much.

You can change speakers and you’ll get a major difference in the frequency response.

But also yes, crappy recorded music sounds crap on $100 systems and on $10.000 systems so in that case the recorded source is also important. But you can only get as good of a source as the original mastering.

Exactly same over here, I ended up with only PEQ a peak at 70-100Hz, and leave everything else as is.

Than don’t get a mic. No one said it would be easy.

REW is to learn acoustics of your room. It’s not that hard if you are willing to put some time and effort in.

But if you’re lazy you could just use the MiniDSP, a mic and Dirac and never touch REW.

I kinda had the same, with low-end gear you can’t hear any difference between good and bad recorded music. It’s all the same.

When upgraded to hi-end gear, I started to notice that some songs I liked are just badly recorded and don’t sound good anymore (you can now hear wat is wrong)

I did find that different cables can change subtle things for the better or worse.

I have a MiniDSP, to fully understand it you really need go in depth otherwise it’s not going to sound good. I use it only to tame my bass and some lite EQ’ing. You don’t want to chance to much with room correction. Better first add some acoustic treatment if possible.