Everything else is just chasing the final improvements, which is great but I feel like a lot of people get sold stuff they don't need. A £40 hand grinder might change your life as much as a £700 machine you got because reddit said so.
Lower grade equipment can make great espresso, but maybe you are managing good results only 1/10 instead of 5/10.
In double blind trials or audiophile I can hear the gold plating sort of way?
I think this type of comparison with espresso is comparing the differences of far different orders of magnitude. i.e. Impact of a bad grinder, poor bean distribution, or tamping force is orders of magnitude larger than the difference cable connectors makes. The difference in the end result is also (and I'm committing audiophile heresy according to some) far more apparent with espresso.
Maybe an analogy here is gold plated wires don't make any difference in a home setup (well, they make zero difference in a digital setup), but when you're AC/DC blowing the roof off an arena with your speakers turned up to 11 bad equipment can be pretty noticeable.
A friend doesn't mind, but he roasts his own beans as well. I've had great espresso from him, and I like it but I'm content with little filter
The new wisdom is grinding coarser, using less coffee, and sending water through at a lower pressure. So instead of an 18g:36g shot dripping out variably in 30 seconds, the aim is something like 15:45g in less than 20 seconds.
[0]: https://strivefortone.com/2020/09/19/low-pressure-turbo-shot...
Roast level is also a big deal. Dark roasts have a much wider sweet spot on the grinding dial. The beans are brittle so they tend to shatter and produce a lot of fines. As long as you don’t grind too fine that the machine chokes during the shot, you’re going to be able to find the sweet spot.
The lighter you go in roast, the more challenging everything becomes. Lighter roasts are less brittle so the grinder tends to cut rather than shatter. This often allows you to grind way finer on the dial. It also makes the coffee much more difficult to extract, requiring higher temperatures and a narrow grind sweet spot. Loads of people complain of sour, weak extractions with no body. This is where you can get into spending loads of money on a high-end flat burr grinder and a pressure profiling machine with PID temperature controls (and even temperature profiling during the shot).
Light roasted single origin coffee beans can smell absolutely amazing, so people know there is potential there for unbelievably good coffee. All of the disappointment in the cup is what leads to the big spending (or giving up and going back to darker roasts).
Fine as in drinkable? Sure. But if you want delicious coffee, with great aroma, crema, etc, there is a big difference between fresh roasted beans and something that has been sitting on a shelf for a few months.
Or, as I see the mountain of stuff required to make high-quality specialty coffee at home, I may do what James Hoffman does and just do drip coffee. There is wisdom in the old, simple ways, and the $4k you can easily spend on a full setup is 1000 espressos made by a professional with bar better, more consistent equipment and tons of practice.
There are a lot of coffee shops near me. I'm surprised at how bad some of the espressos are, a lot too sour, some too bitter. Prices keep going up. You can count the break even point in terms of money, sure, but in my house, the espresso machine paid for itself almost instantly in terms of satisfaction.
But for not much more money you can get an affordable electric burr grinder (like the Delonghi KG79) which will give a good, consistent grind with much less effort than a hand grinder.
I guess I should have made it clearer that I really was talking about coffee in general, not just espresso.