You, sir or madam, are what everyone should aspire to become in this hobby. Someone who actually listens to gear instead of reading graphs, or parroting the same narrative without having much experience in said parroted narrative.

My gear isn’t the typical stuff you usually find. I got the Elekit TU-8200 tube amp and the Questyle CAS192D DAC. I also have a Peachtree Audio DAC•iT^x and a myriad of other amps. Why do I have such relatively esoteric gear? Because I listened to a bunch of different crap when I first started. That’s how I knew that DACs do in fact make a difference and how I learned that tube amps aren’t just distortion galore. My favorite solid state amps sounded similar to tube amps so I was like… I’ll just get a tube amp that’s easy to fix!