With the thousands if not tens/hundreds of thousands of strings, hybrid combinations, tension combinations, etc... that exists in the visible universe, at what point do you say you had enough and just settle on one?
You won't be able to try everything. Life simply isn't long enough.
Everyone knows that you will need to settle on one string (combo) to steadily improve, so when is it enough already for you personally?
I've been coaching high school teams for over 20 years and I started stringing only a couple years after I started coaching. Having a machine at home is great for feeding the curiosity, but it also helped me with cutting through some of the B.S. out there in terms of what type of strings are appropriate or just "better" for certain types of players.
When I eventually tried a full bed of "soft poly" at lower tension in one of my familiar racquets, it destroyed my arm as though the string was specifically engineered to do that to me. All it took was two brief hitting sessions of about 15 minutes each with that string.
That dose of reality was actually really helpful for me. Once poly options were completely off the table for me, I had a lot less to worry about in terms of which string setups might give me a little extra something that I've been missing. I've never been wild about the performance and mediocre service life of multifibers, but I can get absolutely every ounce of feel, performance, and comfort I want with a syn. gut that isn't particularly stiff - that takes Gosen OGSM and Prince SG with Duraflex off my list. One racquet model I use a lot gives me the very best feel and control I want with that frame when it's strung up with cheap-o Forten Tournament Nylon in spiffy lemonade yellow.
In the last five or six years, I know that I've helped more locals with switching away from poly strings than switching into them. I've also witnessed enough tragic outcomes among folks who used RPM Blast in their racquets to declare with high confidence that this string is overpriced garbage. I'm genuinely happy for anybody who has found what they need with poly or poly hybrid setups - I install them for a number of locals who use my stringing services - but I know that they've been marketed to too many older and younger players who haven't benefited from them.
That being said, I know that if my arm was poly tolerant, I'd be having fun with sampling this and that whenever I feel like it. Having a machine at home is terrific for getting my pals back in business without delay and also for when I want to compare/contrast different strings or just different tensions of the same string in a pair of my own frames. Fun matters. It helps with keeping us out there. As long as string obsessions don't distract or derail our pursuits on the courts, I don't think the occasional trials ever need to end. Long term improvement might be interrupted for a bit each time we switch to a new racquet that demands some small adjustments, but trying a different string might require zero adjustment at all. If a new set isn't right, dump it and move on or just go back to what worked in the recent past
