Start with what you already own

Most people upgrading a starter system assume the answer is a new amplifier, a new turntable or a set of cables with a price tag that makes them wince. In our experience, the biggest audible gains in a modest UK living room almost never come from spending money. They come from setting up what you have properly, then spending only where the physics says it will help.

Two identical systems in two different rooms can sound wildly different, and it is rarely the electronics causing that. It is the distance to the wall, the height of the tweeters, the glass coffee table between the speakers and the fact that one system is playing a 128kbps file from 2009. Sort those things first and you will hear more improvement than a £300 amplifier swap would give you.

Speaker placement: the free upgrade

If you do one thing this weekend, do this. Pull your speakers away from the wall behind them. Most small standmounts and almost all rear-ported designs get boomy and muddled when they sit within 10cm of plasterboard. Try 30–60cm of clearance and listen to a bass-heavy track you know well. The low end should tighten up and the midrange should stop sounding congested.

• Aim for an equilateral triangle: the distance between the speakers roughly equals the distance from each speaker to your ears.
• Get the tweeters at seated ear height. If your speakers are on a low sideboard, they are firing at your knees, and you are losing detail.
• Keep them at least 20–30cm from side walls where you can, and angle them slightly inwards so they cross just behind your head.
• Try moving your listening chair rather than the speakers. Sitting hard against the rear wall loads up bass badly.

If the room is small, nearfield listening — speakers close together and you sitting close — often beats trying to fill a space that will fight back.

Isolation: stop the furniture joining in

Anything a speaker sits on becomes part of the instrument. A hollow sideboard, a glass shelf or a wobbly IKEA-style unit will resonate, smearing timing and adding a boxy colouration that no amount of money downstream can fix.

Proper isolation does not need to cost much. A set of dense foam or cork-and-rubber pads under each speaker does most of the work. A granite chopping board or a paving slab from a builders' merchant, sitting on felt pads, makes an excellent budget platform for a turntable or a speaker on a suspended wooden floor. If your speakers came with spikes, use them on carpet and use protective cups on hard floors.

Turntables are the most sensitive of all. A wall-mounted shelf, fixed into brick or a solid stud, will outperform almost any floor-standing support in a room with springy joists. If your records skip when someone walks past, that is not a stylus problem — it is a vibration problem, and it is cheap to solve.

Clean sources beat expensive cables

This is the one people resist, because it is less fun than buying hardware. But a well-recorded, properly encoded file will always beat a poor one, no matter what it travels through.

• Check your streaming app's quality setting. Many default to a compressed tier and stay there quietly for years.
• Rip your CDs to a lossless format rather than a low-bitrate one, and keep the originals as backups.
• Where you can, use a wired connection rather than Bluetooth for critical listening. Bluetooth has improved enormously, but it still costs you something.
• Clean your vinyl. A record brush, a proper wet clean and a new inner sleeve can transform a noisy second-hand LP for the price of a couple of pints.
• Watch your gain structure: if the source is quiet and the amplifier is cranked, you are amplifying hiss along with the music.

Cables: spend sensibly, not spectacularly

You need decent cable. You do not need exotic cable. For most systems, 2.5mm² oxygen-free copper speaker cable is plenty, kept as short as is practical and terminated properly. Thin bell wire from a DIY shop is genuinely a bottleneck; a heavily marketed cable costing £30 a metre is not the answer either.

What does matter is the connections. Loose strands, corroded plugs and banana plugs that have worked loose over five years of dust will rob you of clarity. Pull them out, give the contacts a wipe with isopropyl alcohol, and refit them firmly. Interconnects should be short, tidy and not coiled tightly against a mains transformer. If you have a hum you cannot track down, try plugging the whole system into one extension lead from a single socket before you buy anything.

Small cheap things with real returns

Rooms are half the sound, and the fixes are often domestic rather than specialist. A thick rug between you and the speakers tames a boomy floor. Curtains and a full bookshelf break up reflections that make vocals sound glassy. A bare room with hard floors and large windows will always sound bright, whatever you plug in.

Also worth checking: that your speakers are not sitting directly on the same surface as your turntable, that your amplifier has room to breathe, and that your listening position is not dead centre in a square room — moving a foot forwards or backwards often smooths out a stubborn dip in the bass.

Where to spend when you finally do

Once the free work is done, spend in this order. Speakers first, because they colour the sound most. Then the source, whether that is a better turntable cartridge or a cleaner digital front end. Then the amplifier. Then, and only then, cables and accessories. Isolation pads and speaker stands sit near the top of the list despite their modest cost, because they are doing real acoustic work.

Buy used where you can, from sellers who will let you listen, and take your own familiar music with you. A system that sounds wonderful with your records in your room is worth far more than one that wins an argument on paper.