I sometimes think that headphone + subwoofer should be the best for most people who can't adjust room enough for speakers. I'd like to see such setup but I don't see much.
The bass is the part most affected by the room, though.
There are "buttkickers" for home cinema for simulating ~20Hz sub bass without actually having subwoofers powerful enough. But the "chest thump" affect happens at more like woofer frequency around 90Hz.
In any case $x00 and the ability to say 'eh, good enough' in the end should do...
... OTOH my quixotic project was figuring out RF capture of Laserdiscs which involves digging pretty deep, but it's all open source and it's not just my thing anymore.
This all makes me think of Kermit talking about dreams that get better the more people you share them with.
Yup! I started quite a long time ago (2013 or so), and then Simon Inns in ~2018-2019 built the duplicator and did a great job disseminating things.
oyvindln then worked on VHS decoding as well independantly, and there are quite a few other people helping out too that I can't remember to credit right now.
So my thought is if you're going to get sucked into a big hobby project, it's better to make it something other people can build and get into as well!