Turn Up The Subwoofer For Older Classical Recordings

So for some reason, I turned up the little Rel T-Zero while playing some Dvorak the other night. It's usually on 9:00 - 10:00 for jazz, dance, rock and pop. It could take 10:00. Since classical music doesn't have loud bass, I turned it up to 3:00. (Maximum is about 4:00.)

Everything became fuller, the sound-staging was clearer, and the damn violins stopped being so shrill.

The LS-50's start to fall off after 80Hz, being 6dB down at 47Hz. 3dB is neither here nor there, but 6dB is noticeable. I've set the crossover for the T-Zero at 120 Hz. If that sounds bad, it amounts to the range between the open sixth-string E of a guitar and the 5th string B-flat. Four notes in the key of F - and not the popular ones.

Most of the lower end of the big orchestral instruments get some help from the subwoofer (all the open strings of a double-bass are below 120Hz). As I found when experimenting with the EQ on the Katana, the sub-harmonics make a difference, so all the notes from A below middle-C down will get thickened out as well. Why the violins stop being so shrill, I'm not sure, but it happens.

Older recordings, especially analogue recordings that are subsequently digitised, respond to this well. Modern recordings have more bass in the original signal, so the subwoofer doesn't need to be as loud.

Well worth experimenting, should you have a subwoofer and older recordings of orchestral music.

Upgrading My Music Experience

There's more to the hi-fi listening experience than the sound and the gear and sources that produce it.

Everyone talks about "the room" with its reflections, interferences and standing waves. It's a wonder we can hear anything really. But I'm not thinking about that.

Having a comfortable chair or sofa to sit and listen is important. If you think hi-fi is expensive, try buying a well-made armchair or sofa.

There's also the visual experience: what are you looking at when the music is playing?

And there's another one, which doesn't have a name, but is something to do with not making the best - whatever that means - of one's vast music collection. All those CDs that haven't been played in two or three years, and worse, all those CDs on Qobuz I haven't even found out are there. People with wall-high collections of vinyl will know the feeling of not even remembering they had that album. All that music, and we're ignoring it.

I thought far too much about this stuff (so you don't have to). As a result, I have

a) organised a wi-fi extender for the Hegel H120 so it can use Air Play and I can update it without running LAN cable all over the downstairs 

b) removed all the CDs from the top of the Kallax and put a vase of flowers between the amp and the left speakers 

c) spaced the speakers an extra six inches apart (makes a difference to the sound, really) 

d) turned up the subwoofer a tad (makes even more of a difference to the sound) 

e) accepted that at any given time, I will be playing 1 of about 150 CDs / artists, which is 15% of my collection, hence 

f) I have pruned some of the CDs from the downstairs boxes into the box-room archive 

g) made a directory of the pop / rock / electronic music I have ripped to AAC / MP3 that isn't in the CD boxes, and pointed the iOS Music Streamer at that 

h) resolved to play my Favourites on Qobuz more often 

i) put subscribing to Apple Music (for the classical service) on the to-do list 

j) appreciated that the Sonos app is an excellent consolidator for streaming services and files (the new search looks a lot better)

Which is a lot cheaper than getting a Roon subscription, less time-consuming than ripping everything to FLAC, buying another set of headphones, or upgrading the gear.

See, the problem wasn't the gear. That's as good as I'm going to get for the money.

The problem was the music collection, or rather, the way I was using it. All that music sitting there sulking because I wasn't playing it. No! said Jacob Obrecht, he's not playing Jefferson Airplane again! He did that two weeks ago! What about rotation? Diversity? Equality of playing time?

Anyway, here's a photograph.

Roon and Lightroom - as Distractions

Every now and then I get the feeling that I just don't take music seriously enough if I don't have Roon, and I don't take photography seriously if I don't have Lightroom. I'm sure Roon Labs and Adobe will be pleased to hear that their PR is working.

Lightroom first.

There was an analogue equivalent of Lightroom. It was called 'the darkroom', and in it the professionals did things like cross-process, experiment with paper stock, dodge-and-shade, and many other things. Photoshop was developed so professional photographers could futz with digital photographs the same way they had been doing with film. We amateurs accepted that was for professionals: there was no shame in not knowing your way round a darkroom.

Lightroom is software, it doesn't need a dedicated room. There's no excuse for not learning the basics and beyond. It's a real tool used by serious hobbyists and professionals - and real pros use Capture One Pro (as well) to tether their camera to a Mac with a big screen. If you think the basic Lightroom + Photoshop subscription is expensive, wait until you see how much the monthly subscription to Capture One Pro is. (The commercial portrait photography pros will tell you it pays for itself in extra sales in no time.)

Photos is good enough to do the basic changes I need to make: a tweak to the alignment here, maybe a little touch on the colours, brightness and contrast. DxO Perspective if the angles are really off. We snap-shooters don't do filters and pre-sets. Those are for pros, and the pre-sets in Photos are, well, just not for me.

Adobe have got their hooks into me with Lightroom. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I feel I'm not taking my photography seriously if I don't have it. On the other days of the week, I know that the first thing I need to do to take photography seriously is a) travel more, b) do still lives. Using Lightroom for the occasional snaps I take at the moment would be close to "all the gear and no idea".

Now Roon.

I'll admit it, the only reason I want Roon is so I can stop feeling inferior every time John Darko or someone of that ilk mentions it. I said I get the feeling that I'm not taking music seriously enough if I don't have Roon, but that's not correct.

You're reading the gibberish of a man who has read Burkholder's History of Western Music, and the Oxford History of Music, plus a few more. I can read music (just) and play guitar and piano (after a fashion). My collection runs from Coltrane to Corelli. I have attended a performance of Opus Calivcumbalisticum and sat through the Ring Cycle. I saw Elton John before he had his first hit, and Miles Davis when he played the Festival Hall. I have been to Proms and the Wigmore Hall. I'm as serious about music as anyone can be who doesn't do it for a living, and still has a sense of proportion.

What I'm not so serious about is hi-fi aka "the hobby". I like my music to sound good. I've always had decent entry-level gear, and the step up to the next-level set-up I have now was well-worth it. I'm not a gear-head or a collector. I'm the guy who buys gear because it does a good job, not because I want to "own the brand". I have, however, read the Master Handbook of Acoustics, so I guess that counts.

I did try Roon, and wrote about it. It's a resource hog: you will not be rendering video and running Roon at the same time. I was impressed by its speed and ability to find album art when Apple Music couldn't. In the end it didn't make enough of a difference for the price. I can't help feeling that to some extent Roon is a status symbol: I have Roon, I'm a real audiophile with lots of spare cash (or do all audiophiles have spare cash?). I don't have a huge digital library: I rip music to transfer it to my phone for travelling. That's it.

What's really happening is that I feel I'm not taking something I'm doing seriously enough, and the part of the brain that is responsible for distraction and short-cuts throws this chaff about Lightroom, Roon or anything else out.

It's never about gear - except on the very rare occasions when it actually is.

Hegel H120 and Apple Airplay 2

I love the sound of my H120, and of the rest of the system. Even now, I will still look up and think by heck that sounds good. In the same way I would hear the old system and think it's not quite...right, is it?

I stream through a Sonos Connect connected via an optical cable, or an iPad connected via USB.

Since I don't live in a fancy Norwegian house that had Cat 6 cable wired in along with the mains when it was built, and the Hegel doesn't have Wi-Fi (and that was not a deal-breaker) I have a wi-fi extender to connect it to the home network.

In theory I could use AirPlay, but until the last update that never seemed to work. Now it does.

The bit where I choose the Hegel from my Air volume control and the amplifier switches itself to Network and some You Tube commentary comes out of my hi-fi is truly... cute.

But...

But...

But...

The Hegel refuses to play with the other kit on AirPlay. I can group my Sonos One's and the Beam, because they support AirPlay2, but choose the H120 and everything else falls off.

Guys!

You made it work with Spotify Connect.

AirPlay 2 is how Apple offers multi-room hi-fi without having to do all the deals Sonos has done... let me explain that.

Sonos has done deals with a bunch of providers to the effect "You send individual streams to each of the Sonos items our customers have, and we will incorporate your service into our pretty darn fabulous app. Oh, and we sell a LOT of kit." Someone will be kicking back to someone on this deal, but I'm guessing the amounts are fairly small.

Sonos have patented the multi-source, multi-destination, grouping and independent volume control stuff. Google lost a lawsuit badly to that effect in 2021. Apple doesn't have more cash than Croesus because it pays licensing fees to competitors. That's why AirPlay runs through the controlling iDevice and only handles one stream at a time: to avoid the Sonos patents. Apple licenses AirPlay to anyone who asks, so a lot of other hi-fi manufacturers use it to provide multi-room and save themselves the trouble of developing their own. All the streaming service apps offer AirPlay integration. Why pay Sonos when you could be getting paid instead?

I can live without AirPlay, and mostly do. But it would be nice to have the option to do real multi-room streaming to include the Hegel.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Three

Welcome to the "small rooms" owners' club.

Once again, pro sound treatment methods (bass traps, reflectors, absorbers and soundproofing) are essential for studios and can be useful for "larger rooms". No-one is saying otherwise.

But one-metre deep bass traps are not feasible in a small room. Nor is six-inch absorption padding all round the walls. Isn't the room small enough already? Nor are serious soundproofing measures, which also require thick lumps of absorbent materials. And have you noticed that the rooms in treatment videos belong to people who don't read, have no art or decoration, and store their CD's and records in another room? No wonder they need absorbers and diffusers. Real rooms have bookcases, shelving, pictures on the wall, and other stuff. Some of that helps. What else can we do?

If you are following the user manual for your speakers, you will be sitting about two-three metres from them. No matter what size your room is. Or what the speakers are. (Have you seen how close people sit to those Wilson towers?)

Contrary to some commentators' sniffy remarks, thick pile carpets and loose hanging curtains a distance from the wall do work: see this table of absorption coefficients. Curtains and carpets are pretty much third for absorption after foams and fibres, and then people.

Am I sure I'm not rationalising my unwillingness to spring for a dozen GiK acoustics panels for £700 or so, plus all that drilling and hanging? Well, that's why I write things like this: to make sure I've got my facts in a row. And I think I have.

There wouldn't be home hi-fi if the first thing you were told by your dealer was "we couldn't sell you any of this with a clear conscience until you've had your listening room re-built by an expert, otherwise you'll just come back and complain it sounds terrible". It has to be pretty good out of the box in nearly all circumstances.

We small-roomers are left with the simple things, which are more about the overall sound of the room than specific flaws.

Rugs for wooden floors

Curtains to the full width of the room so that the corners as well as the windows are covered

Shelves with books, record collections, even storage (as long as it's not a wall of boxes), for dispersion and absorption. Just don't line everything up neatly or you'll lose the dispersive effect

Symmetry: equal spacing between left and right speakers to their near walls, same distance from the front wall, both at ear height; books or records (aka 'damping') to the right wall means books or records ('damping') to the left wall in the same place.

All that work for that conclusion? Hey, I saved a lot of money on those acoustic panels.

So I'm upgrading the carpets and doing something about the (long story) curtains on the windows. The front wall is going to be a curtain with folds hanging from a tension bar. That will do for now. In time I may change the furniture around and get some more natural damping.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Two

Room treatment is mostly about room modes and reflections. (Sound-proofing is taken to be out-of-scope since it needs building work.)

Room modes first. These are sound waves that bounce back and forth between the walls, or floor and ceiling, because the wavelengths fit the dimensions just right. This is where boomy bass comes from.

Small rooms are held to be a lost cause because they have many, many of these resonating frequencies. That may be true, but there's a VERY important qualification: those room modes only matter if any of them correspond to one of the 88 frequencies used in the music you are most likely listening to.

Yep. There are zillions of frequencies that could be used to make music, but almost all Western Music is made with 88 of them. Here's a list. You will notice the only ones that are whole numbers are the A's from 55Hz upwards. All the rest are given to five (5) decimal places, in a scheme called twelve-tone equal temperament (which is a music theory rabbit-hole all its own). Western musical instruments are mass-produced to reproduce those notes. The chances of your room having a resonant frequency corresponding to some random note like F# above low-C (say) are approximately zero.

And if you do, all you have to do is move the speakers either back or forward a couple of centimetres (front-to-back resonance), or closer or further apart a couple of centimetres (side-to-side resonance), and it will disappear. (This is called positional equalisation.) It will not to be replaced by one on another note because a) the difference in wavelengths between any of the 88 notes is more than a couple of centimetres, and b) the resonance is between the speaker and the back or side walls, not between the front and back walls, which would be a room resonance, and your speaker is not mounted in the walls. (And even if it was, the point remains the same!)

If you have a floor-firing subwoofer, you can't fix a room mode like that, because the way the sound waves come from the subwoofer mean the resonance will be from floor-to-ceiling. Should a piece of music contain a hefty belt of 73.4 Hz D or 36.7 Hz D, both of which will pass into my subwoofer, I get a resonance. However, only five-string double-basses and instruments with names starting 'octocontra' ever get down to 36.7 Hz, leaving me with exactly one note that can trigger that resonance, and that's still way down low even for a string-bass. And no, very few pieces of music are written to include octocontra-anythings, and most orchestras would either not perform them, or use the programme or sleeve notes to apologise for the missing instrument. The lower you cross over to your subwoofer, the fewer possibilities for resonance you have.

How about all those reflections? According to the Master Handbook of Acoustics

Our hearing mechanism integrates spatially separated sounds over short intervals, and under certain conditions tends to perceive them as coming from one location.... in an auditorium, the ear and brain have the ability to gather all reflections arriving within about 35ms after the direct sound, and combine...them to give the impression that the entire sound field is coming from the direction of the original source, even though reflections from other directions are involved...This is called the Precedence Effect, Hass effect, or law of the first wavefront.

In more familiar terms, the ear has a buffer about 35ms deep. At the speed of sound that's 12m. I am two metres from my speakers. Any sound along a path strictly less than 14 metres from speaker to ear will have its sound combined with the direct sound from the speakers. That's all the first reflections in my room. So in a "small room", first reflections do not appear as separate sound sources. Instead, those reflections give the sound a sense of spaciousness which is greater as the power of the reflections increases. Reflections have to be quite loud before they are perceived as echoes. (In my "small room", the first reflections are travelling something like 3m to reach me, so they are 4/9 (inverse square law) as powerful as the direct sound, which leads to a drop of 3dB in volume and whatever absorption I get at the wall. Every little helps.)

Reflections good - sometimes. Too many and too loud, and the sound image will lose sharpness or you will get echoes. Too few and too quiet and the sound will feel muffled and dull. The trick is to get the sound quality you like.

Those with "small rooms", read on.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part One

Steve Gutenberg says we should try room treatments. John Darko has those GiK boards all over the place. I'm starting to feel I'm not responding to the memo.

Except...

Acoustic treatment for studios is a real thing: studios need all the soundproofing their owner can afford, and a lot of plain old echo-deadening in the recording space. Performers don't like heavily damped studio acoustics, which is why some of them prefer to plug into the board and hear each other over headphones. Then they can perform together in a room that looks as if it was designed for humans.

Audio design for a concert-hall is a real thing. Soundproofing from outside noise, getting a decent quality of sound in all the seats, tuning it to be lively or dry, depending on the taste of the resident orchestra, or the kind of music that it will be played in it, all this is serious stuff. Consult someone with an acoustics degree. Something similar might be said for the listening rooms of millionaires, who can afford to have chunks of their houses re-built or re-furbished.

I can't, and I assume you can't either. I have a rectangular room that's 14L x 10w x 7.7H in feet, just over 1,000 cu ft. In the trade this is called a small room. The Master Handbook of Acoustics(*) dismisses any room of less that 1,500 cu ft as a lost cause. Others define "small" as anything smaller than a classroom.

Watch a few room treatment You Tube videos and you will wonder how on earth you are able to hear anything, let alone identify it as Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain. What with diffusion, room modes, reflections off the floor, the ceiling, the side walls, the back corners, runaway bass that needs to be trapped... it's a wonder you can hear the tuba.

Except...

Once the speakers and listening position are set up right...

...and you've got some carpet on that varnished pine floor...

...and you've accepted, like me, the inevitability of hauling the couch from the back of the room so that my head was the third point of a (nearly) equilateral triangle with the speakers (**)

...you can indeed hear the tuba. And everything else. And no obvious echoes or reflections.

How does this happen?

Read on.

(*) That's what it's called, and you get 10,000 Audiophile Points for reading it.

(**) Which is where speaker manufacturers say to sit. If you don't do this, and put your speakers at different heights and distances from the walls, and have books below them, then the orchestra may well wind up in the upper-right-hand corner of your room. So a friend told me, anyway.

The Drums Are In The Middle

Where are the drums in your audiophile soundstage?

They're in the middle.

Which is odd, because in the studio, the drummer is usually in an isolation booth. A very isolation booth. Nowhere near the middle of anything.

In the mix, the drums are always in the middle.

Those are the rules.

Because at a live gig, the drums are always in the middle. (Even in an orchestra.)

Here's your starter for ten. All those speakers on and around that big stage. Stereo or mono?

Nope. Those speakers are mono. Maybe different frequencies from different parts of the speaker cabinet, but all the speaker units are relaying the same thing on both sides. (Unless they want a sound effect.)

Live concert speakers have to be mono, or most of the audience would get a horrible sound experience. Like sitting behind the horns at an orchestral concert.

The soundstage on a CD is not an attempt to present what was in the studio (there's no studio for EDM, for one thing).

It's an attempt to create a kind-of-live experience.

So now you're going to mix the first CD from a new band. There's a limited budget for mixing time. What do you do?

Make all the channels equal, both sides.

Just like it would be at the gig.

Then throw in enough differences to spread the sound between the speakers. Maybe shift the guitar slightly to the right, the bass to the left, the keyboards to the right of the guitar, but keep the sax solo in the middle. Because that's what would happen at the gig. Maybe someone wants the chorus voices to be well to the left and the synth to the right.

Yep that sounds good. Next track.

A bunch of the CDs I have must have been made like that.



And a lot were not.



(YMMV via You Tube and your hi-fi.)

Modern abstract music depends on sound design for its effect. Orchestras have a bias to the right where the horns, cellos and basses are. EDM is designed to swirl around between the speakers. Though the voice is usually in the middle, because that's where we expect the singer to be on stage.

But the results all have one thing in common.

The drums are always in the middle.

The Search For Headphones 2: Entry-Level Strikes Back

A pair of Meze Empyrean will cost around £2,800. The Sennheiser HD800S cost around £1,400.

Audiophiles. They must be bonkers.

Here's a thought that came at me from left-field. My new speakers cost three and a half times the old ones - even allowing for the sale price on the LS50's and an additional subwoofer. The amp+CD transport cost about the same multiple of the original amp + cd player + Dragonfly Black for streaming.

The HD650 cost about £400 when I bought them. That's more than I paid for the amplifier I was using.

Applying the 3.5 rule, I get £1,400. Applying the "more than I paid for the amplifier" rule, I get around £2,000, since that's what an H120 costs (but that includes DACs which the previous amp didn't. Take the cost of a comparable DAC out, and we're back to about £1,400). Apply the "pay more than the amplifier" rule and... no, I just can't justify it.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the HD650 started sounding much better. Especially after I replaced the ear pads, which had been getting a little soft. That made a real difference to the sense of space in the sound. These are just fine, I told myself, what do I want to change for?

(A couple of weeks later)

I went through this exact process with the amplifier + CD player + external DAC combination, before getting something way outside of anything I'd been looking at before. I would listen to the Marantz and telling myself that it was just fine and didn't need changing. (It is just fine, but it did.) The HD650 are darn good headphones, but they weren't quite the sound I was looking for. Those things are intense. Seriously.

I realised I wanted something more... open, relaxed, something along those lines.

I watched a few more YT reviews.

And went back to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden, with a new list to try.

Meze 99 Classics. Hifiman Sundara. Audeze LC-1.

Yep. All "entry-level hi-fi".

I can't hear anything over about 11kHz. I have "entry-level" ears. Years of 60dB-70dB noise from trains, tubes, traffic, offices and passing aircraft will take its toll.

The Meze 99's are comfortable, have nice tight bass, and are easy to drive, but there was something...

The Audeze LC-1 sounded okay. At these price levels "okay" doesn't cut it. I didn't like the fit over my ears. Put to one side.

The Hifiman Sundara fit just fine. And had a clear, wide sound. The bass wasn't quite as snappy as the Meze 99's. But they had something.

Acid test. A Bruckner symphony.

No contest. The Meze were probably not even designed to handle orchestral music.

The Sundara's did just fine.

We have a winner. At £299.

I'd say the Sundara's are closer to the monitor-like sound and clarity of my LS50's. The HD650 are darker: clear, good definition and detailed, sure, but as I said, also intense. I have the Sundara on now, and I'm thinking, "yep, this is the sound I want".

Turns out I didn't want better (and even if I did, I could justify the expense), I wanted different.

The Sad Story of a Three-Times Faulty Pro-Ject T1 Turntable

I am assured that Pro-Ject make excellent turntables.

Lots of hi-fi stores seem to agree, since some stock little else.

I bought a white T1 from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi recently as a present for Sis, who has shelves of inherited vinyl and no deck.

Drove it half-way round the M25 to Sis' place. Installed it.

Was the drive spindle supposed to wobble like that?

(How was I supposed to know? It could be a design feature.)

Called Sevenoaks Hi-Fi on the day and asked them. They said they would ask Pro-Ject's UK distributor.

Nobody gets back to anybody for a couple of weeks.

The drive belt fell off when Sis tried to play a 45. That's not supposed to happen.

Drive half-way round the M25 to collect it for return to Sevenoaks. Who send it to Pro-Ject's UK distributor.

Who tighten the screws on the motor mount.

And return it to Sevenoaks Hi-Fi a couple of weeks later.

The spindle is still wobbling. In fact, it's worse.

Because one of the screws is in a soft patch of wood (or some other such flaw) and vibrations of any kind loosen it.

Back to the distributor.

A week or so later it comes back. The spindle was secure.

They had shifted the motor round and re-secured it in new screw holes. (I know because I called the distributor and spoke an incredibly helpful member of staff.)

Drove it half-way round the M25 to Sis' place. Installed it.

The belt fell off when we tried to play it at 45.

Called Sevenoaks immediately and said "That's enough. I want my money back".

Drove it half-way round the M25 to return it and get my money back.

Like Sis said: why didn't the distributor just say Send it back and we'll send you a new one in the first place?

I don't think it would have made a difference. I think there are design flaws.

The screws securing the drive unit to the plattern are small. Way too small.

The drive spindle has a wide lip top and bottom of the 33 rpm section. The belt is not going to fall out of it. The lip on the 45 rpm section is way too narrow.

Finally, each unit is not tested before delivery. The parts might be, but the assembled unit is not. Otherwise they would have found the loose motor mount before the unit was even shipped.

Which is why Sis does not want another Pro-Ject. (Personally I hope she takes a liking to a Technics DJ deck....)

Music Streaming By iPad

Am I the only person who wonders why anyone would pay hi-fi prices for a streaming device when there are iPads?

More to the point, when there are spare iPads, or even a recent generation iPod, or an iOS 12 or later iPhone left over from an upgrade. I re-purposed an old 16GB Air after I upgraded to a later model with more storage. My only mini-gripe is speed of app loading. The response once loaded is just fine.

Music does not need state-of-art kit - video does. My music files (AAC or MP3, granted) are on a removable HDD, attached to a ten-year-old ASUS netbook running Windows 7 on a Celeron chip and connected by WiFi. The Stratospherix Music Streamer finds the HDD as a regular Windows drive, and scans the directories to create a catalogue with album art on the iPad. A rescan of my 1,000+ CDs takes about ten minutes at most.

Connect the iPad to your amplifier as follows:

Apple Camera Adapter with power pass-through. There's one for Lightning ports and one for USB-C ports. Connect the Lightning / USB-C pigtail to the iPad, and the cable from the transformer to the pass-through port. This will provide power without draining batteries. Connect to an external DAC or amplifier digital input using a USB-A to USB-(whatever the other end is) cable. If you don't have an external DAC or a super-integrated amplifier, you can use a Dragonfly or some other USB DAC, and connect its output to an analogue input on the amp.

Download whatever streaming or music apps you need onto the iPad - those apps are free, subscriptions for content may apply. I have the Sonos (don't judge me) app, Qobuz, and Stratospherix Music Streamer (that has a minimal cost). An iPad can handle Naxos and other services that don't play nice with Sonos and other streaming-controller-apps (from e.g. KEF or Naim). It can also be a Roon controller. Of course it can: it's a computer.

The path is digital all the way from the music server to the DAC, wherever that may be.

There are discussions about whether the hi-fi people can build a digital link between their wi-fi card / LAN port to their DAC which is audibly better than Apple's link in the iPad. I will leave that argument to more techie heads than mine.

Two things.

It has to be Apple, because Android re-samples everything to 16/48 (or near offer). Apple pretty much passes the digits through, so if you get 24/192 or whatever in through the wireless, that's what will go out of the Lightning / USB port.

And, this only works if you have an older iPad, a superceded iPhone with iOS12+, or a recent iPod, hanging around.

Otherwise cost becomes a factor. iPads are £400 or so, and those Camera Adapters are £40-80. If you don't have a DAC, a Dragonfly Black is around £100. iPods are less than £200 and have the same functionality but a smaller screen. (I started streaming using an iPod. Didn't notice a difference moving between the two.) Whereas the Bluesound Node is £399 at Richer Sounds, everyone says it's wonderful, and it has its own DAC so it plays nice with an analogue-only amplifier. And you do get 500 Audiophile Points if you have Bluesound Node. (I think there's a penalty for using Apple gear.)

Hence the qualification of my question: when there are spare iPads.

Low-Fi, Hi-Fi Defined

It's low-fi if the recording is a test of your kit. As in I never heard the guitar part before.

It's entry-level hi-fi if you say That's really good, much better than what I had before.

It's hi-fi if your kit is a test of the recording. As in Jeez, that mix is a mess.

John Darko is the only reviewer who really talks about this. Sometimes the production just does not warrant a highly-accurate, clear, analytical set-up. All that does is make you hear every bit of scratchy playing, poor balance and messy microphone placement in the studio. Not to mention the faults in the recording deck, and the mixing engineer's tin ear.

Every time I've started doubting a piece of my kit, I put on a different piece of music, and there is everything I thought was missing before: the soundstage, the tight bass, the instrumental separation, the details. It was missing one the earlier music because it wasn't in the recording in the first place. If you doubt this, play some jazz from the late 1950's, preferably recorded by Rudy van Gelder. It's all there in the recording and mastering. Then play Seether, which is a terrific noise, but it's mixed for headphones and low-fi kit.

This raises an interesting question. Shouldn't we have different kit for different types of music? Distortion-heavy rock is not well-served by highly-analytical gear, but baroque and jazz is. It's not going to work for speaker-fi and amps, because the only people with more than one of those at any given time are reviewers. The rest of us pays the money and lives with the consequences. Choose the gear to suit what you spend most of your time listening to. I don't listen to a lot of distortion-heavy rock music.

When I do, it might be nice to have a pair of headphones to soften the harshness of the distortion. Which is maybe why some people have multiple headphones.

That Audiophile Soundstage

If you've got your speakers, room and listening position set up, the speakers should disappear. The music should be coming from the space between the speakers, which should seem to be sitting on their stands, or shelves, doing nothing.

You should also be able to close your eyes and point to where the instruments are located. Bass there. Voice there. Guitar there. If it's a piano solo, the bass notes should be on one side and the high notes on the other.

So goes the audiophile line.

Go to a live performance by a string quartet and you won't get this separated soundstage. The players will be sitting fairly close together, from the left: violin, viola (or second violin), cello, and bass on the right. They need to be able to see and hear each other, not have to wave across a wide stage. The result is a near-mono experience: the sound is experienced as one thing, it does not need to be assembled from this on the left and that on the right.

A lot of recorded string quartets sound like that: each instrument can be picked out easily, but try the pointing game, and they are all around the centre of the stage.

An orchestra is a nearly-stereo experience live and on recording: low notes - horns, basses, cellos - to the right (facing the orchestra), high notes (violins, bells) to the left, woodwind, trumpets and flutes in the middle above the violas. Orchestral recordings veer to the left a lot. Listening live, you do find your eyes moving to the source of a sound, especially if it is a brief solo passage.

Those speakers at a club or a live gig are mono. That way everyone hears the same thing. If it was stereo, only a handful of people would hear it all, and most would be getting one side or the other. At Sadlers Wells flamenco performances, it used to take me a few minutes to train my ears and eyes to allocate the sound to the instruments.

And the whole point of medieval choirs is that you cannot tell one singer from the next, let alone where they are standing. The sound should seem to come from heaven itself, in one blended voice that can sing different notes at once. People who sing that music tell me they cannot pick out the individual lines either.

In the 1960's stereo was sometimes done by putting some instruments on one side and the others on the other side. Maybe the drums and voice appeared in the middle. Early stereo recordings mostly come from the speakers, not the space between. It's not a good sound, to my ears.

The way audiophiles talk about their soundstage, you'd think that every mix took the trouble to place the instruments apart, distinct and to use the full width of the stereo. But a lot of records do not do that. Miles Davis' 1980 albums have all the sound grouped towards the middle of the stage. I wondered why for a while, then realised that Miles wanted it to sound good to anyone in the room no matter where they were. He wanted to make music people would party to, not sit on their own in the sweet spot, venerating. Jazz has always been party / club music.

Famously, mono is supposed to feel like it is coming from the middle of your head over headphones. Sit in the sweet spot of a stereo, and the music seems to come from a band about six inches wide. It's like there's a third speaker in the middle. Stand further back and that mono-band gets wider. The instruments are distinguishable, not smeared, but not stereo-separated. It sounds like you're hearing the music through the door of the club.

The audiophile soundstage is an artefact of two-channel audio and a particular way of mixing the sound to space it out. That's why it does not work outside of a sweet spot, and why, when a piece is mixed for the sweet spot, as often as not, we wind up listening to it on headphones, where we don't have to worry about our exact placing in the room.

The Search For Headphones

My current head-fi is a pair of Sennheiser HD650s I bought in 2014. Before that I had a pair of HD580's. There's a 2019 edition of the HD650's available for £550 on Amazon, I paid less for mine. A LOT of reviewers will say that, as far as they are concerned, the HD650 are the best pair of headphones they have heard, not only at the price point, but at all. Mixing engineers like them, audiophiles like them, ordinary listeners like them. I like them, but they lack a certain... something that might not exist.

The 2019 edition of my HD650's cost as much as my KEF LS50 speakers (on sale). Headphones can cost less than £50 and the pro reviewers are very enthusiastic about the Meze Empyrean, £2,800 at Audio Sanctuary. There are more expensive sets.

Look at a headphone review channel on YT and you will notice those guys have a LOT of headphones. Read some of the comments on the boards and it becomes obvious that some people just like buying headphones. I think there are 'Headphonies' like there are 'Watchies' - people who buy headphones. Instead of, you know, holidays or armfuls of CDs. Oh, and both Watchies and Headphonies are slightly deranged. No doubt.

My theory is that watches just don't deliver, on repeated use and viewing, a big enough belt of feel-good hormones to produce satisfaction. Not like a Monet. Or a Ford Mustang. Or listening to a next-level hi-fi. Hence a continuing need to trade, swap or purchase something different.

I look at those reviewers' racks of headphones, see the same symptom, and suspect a similar cause. Maybe the differences between audiophile headphones might be even more subtle than that between speakers. I wasn't going to rely on reviews.

So I went to Audio Sanctuary in New Malden (five minutes from the station, hidden in a square off the High Street) and explained my conundrum. I wanted the next step up from HD650's. They found me a pair of Denon AH-D7200, Audeze LCD-2, Focal Celstee, and the Sennheiser HD800S (slightly out of my budget, but I did ask). The Focals were an instant NO. Someone else might like them, but I didn't. The Audeze were exactly as 'warm' and with exactly the effect on my neck of the extra weight as everyone said. If they could just shave a couple of hundred grams off, and ease the bass back a little... which brings me to the Denon. If you stole my Sennys and left the Denons, I would not complain. Nice sound. Better build quality that the, let's face it, plastic Sennys. However, with none of these did I think: ah, so this is what modern headphones sound like!.

Until I got to the HD800S. Vanishingly light on the head. Slightly light on bass. But everything else was there. I could tell the second clarinet was sitting too close to the oboe in a recording of Bruckner 3 (slight hyperbole, but not a lot). Better control of the loud and quiet bits. But on Miles Davis' Cellar Door Sessions, the bass did feel light even compared to the HD650s, and everything else sounded pretty much the same. It wasn't WOW!, but it was noticeable.

So many headphones. So little difference.

Some of this is the nature of my search. I was looking for a 'neutral' sound, or anything that made me go WOW! Pretty much by definition, there's really only one way to do 'neutral', and once the engineers have figured that out, they can spend the rest of their days figuring out how to cut the costs. Or figuring out just how much more expensive it is to get that last little improvement, and can they produce anything better at a price people will be willing to pay?

Sennheiser aim for 'neutral': it's what they do. Many of the other companies spend money on the look of the headphone, with polished woods, deep leather ear-pads and so on, and that creates a luxury feel that some people will pay a premium for. Sennheiser prefer the, uh, functional look, it keeps the costs down, which gives them a price-for-quality advantage that's hard to beat.

If I listened to headphones a lot, and if a lot of that was nineteenth-century Romantic symphonies and concertos, or opera (shudder!) from any period, I might take the plunge on the HD800S. But I don't. I listen to EDM, jazz, rock and pop, and most music composed before Beethoven. Any pair of audiophile 'neutral' headphones over about £450 or so will make a good show of that.

(And if I'm going to pay that kind of money for a pair of headphones, I'm bringing the Hegel into the store.)

The Next-Level System: Audiolab Transport to Hegel Heaven

Entry-level: an analogue-only Marantz PM6003 amp with a Marantz CD6005 CD player (and hence a DAC), a Sonos Connect (and hence another DAC), and streaming through an iPad+Audioquest Jitterbug+Audioquest Black Dragonfly (another DAC), through B&W 6008's or Sennheiser HD650's. For some music, this is a neat set-up and perfectly good. It loved modern electronic dance music, but wasn't so keen on Romantic orchestral music.

First upgrade was getting the speaker and listening positioning right. This makes the single largest difference. Accepting that you will sacrifice everything in one room in the pursuit of disappearing speakers and a deep and wide soundstage.

Second upgrade was the speakers, to KEF LS50's - advice from Steve Gutenberg and John Darko videos, plus a deal from Sevenoaks Hi-Fi. I wrote about that here.

Next upgrade was a sub-woofer, the REL T Zero - advice from a Steve Gutenberg video, I wrote about that here.

In both cases I noticed that all the pros had these things - though usually heftier sub-woofers.

I spent a long time on the next upgrade. I'd long had my eyes on the Naim Uniti Atom, because everyone raved about it. My local Kent-based hi-fi telephone sales line, however, did not sound enthusiastic. They preferred the NAD M10, which was out of consideration because no headphone socket means an external headphone amp, or a CD player with a headphone amp. (And who the heck makes an amp without a 6.35mm headphone socket? Oh, the Uniti Atom has a 3.5mm socket. Come on guys: 6.3mm is good enough for the stage and studio, it's good enough on next-level gear.)

So I followed my instinct struck the Atom from my list.

The CD player had to be improved. That's £1,000 and some more. Or I could get a CD transport, and an external DAC, or an amplifier with a built-in DAC. This took me into combination hell. The CD Transport became a fixed point, which meant an integrated amplifier / DAC or an external DAC + analogue integrated amplifier.

Yep, external DACs. Another box. The names start sounding like an audiophile review: Denafrips, NAD, Chord. I had a reluctance about that.

Not getting anywhere. Looking up too many details I don't really know how to interpret.

Time for a thought-experiment. Just go half-bonkers. What about actual high-end? A McIntosh? The MA5300 is only £6,500 or so and has built-in DACs. Surely a vanity purchase, but would it ever look good on my Kallax units.

Okay, not that then. But it got me looking at the more boutique-y suppliers. And there I saw Hegels.

The reviewers all like Hegel amps. They refer to Hegel when they want a reference. The name is pronounced with a certain deference. Plus, look, there's the H120 with a built-in high-quality DAC, power just where I want it, and a reassuringly heavy toroidal transformer. On the downside, it has no wi-fi and rudimentary streaming, but that's all going to be controlled by the iPad.

Oh! Look! Premium Sound do a home trial service!

Hi, is that Premium Sound? Can you send me an Audiolab 6000CDT (silver) and a Hegel H120 (white) to try out please? Yep, here are my credit card details. The two parcels arrived on two different days, which was probably a courier thing. I was busy for a couple of days, and then opened the boxes. Caaaaaarefully, because if I didn't like it, it has to be spotless on return. (Since I took the demo units they sent, they gave me a discount. That makes me a real audiophile.)

Unplug the wires from the existing kit. Set up the new stuff. Take a photograph of the subwoofer connections so I don't forget. iPad into the USB-B socket; CD transport into an optical input; Sonos into an analogue until another QCD optical cable arrives from Amazon.

Put on Barenboim's Mahler 4 - my test for all improvements.

Oh Holy Moly! So that's what they heard when the orchestra was playing! It sounded like an orchestra, not like a good recording of an orchestra. It sounded like it must have sounded to the record company, or they would never have released it.

I have gone on with that feeling with almost everything I've played.

Let's be realistic. There is some music that the original set-up handled almost as well. Close-mic'ed quartets, jazz, electronic dance music, contemporary composed music, solo recitals, not to mention 320kps Spotify. For the price, excellent, just like the What Hi-Fi reviews of Marantz gear say. Some recordings are just a mess, and nothing will ever change that.

The big jump is from the space- and budget- friendly all-in-one units from Denon and the like, to entry-level hi-fi. It's a jump in cost and a matching jump in quality. The jump from entry-level to next-level is only worth making if you have accepted the Discipline of the Sweet Spot, or if you're going to spend serious money on headphones (Sennheiser HD 660S type money and above). For most people it's a jump that won't be worth making, and there's nothing wrong with that. It depends on how much you listen to music.

Anyway, that's me ascended to 'next-level gear'. And happy with it.

Hi-Fi Upgrades - Go Qobuz!

I must have played one too many Spotify playlists. I got tired of Spotify.

I've done Tidal.

So I tried Qobuz.

OMG!

96kHz streaming. 192kH... iPad reboots itself. Set 96kHZ as maximum.

CD-quality streaming.

Why wasn't I listening when various You Tubers talked about it?

Maybe I thought, hey I can barely tell the difference between 320kps vs a CD on my current system, why would I notice the difference between anything more?

Stream CD-quality through the Jitterbug+Black Dragonfly and it just sounds better than 320kps.

As good as my CD player, if not better.

Sources matter.

Hi-Fi Alternatives: The More The Merrier

CD? Streaming? Vinyl? FM / AM Radio? Internet Radio? Lossy rips? Losless rips? Live? Which is best? Can CDs be replaced by streaming? Do real audiophiles collect vinyl? Apples, oranges, tangerines or bananas?

Radio and streaming are methods of data transport. CDs, vinyl and music files on hard drives are methods of data storage. Smart phones, CD players, streaming devices, DACs, amplifiers, loudspeakers, headphones and in-ears are ways of converting the data and delivering the sound to your ears. The streaming service and the radio station holds the storage media and the right to broadcast it. You pay them for access to that broadcast. Or put up with adverts in the case of radio. You own the CD, vinyl or music files and the equipment to transport, convert and deliver the data it holds. You get a perpetual right to listen to it. The other extreme is a live concert, where you own nothing and get a one-time right to listen to it. Streaming is somewhere between those two: you have a renewable right to access what the streaming company itself has a renewable right from the artists and record companies to make available.

A live concert is more than someone delivering sound to you. It's an event. You can see the performers. It may be a one-off, with a legendary figure on the stage. Streaming is just data delivery. The experience is how you are listening to the music: on the train, in front of your speakers, from a Sonos One as you fall asleep. Only a small part of that experience is down to the quality of the streaming service. Playing a CD is a more restricted experience than streaming, since you have to be in the room with the speakers or headphones. A part of that experience may be the higher quality of the sound from the CD transport and the DAC, than can be had from the streaming service. Vinyl is its own sound experience: literally a different sound from the CD of the same album, less dynamic range and a bunch of other compromises.

Each service has its own purpose. It's not either/or but both/and.

Live music is a win for the experience: you had to be there, and you were. Streaming gives you a replacement for radio and gets rid of the adverts, though the curation may not be as good. Streaming works in your house, your friend's house, on the train, in the car, wherever there is enough broadband or cellular. It's a definite addition to the technological mix. CD and vinyl is for when you want a specific experience of listening and the sense of ownership: you chose that CD / album, you paid for it, and you decided to keep it rather than bin it in embarrassment.

What makes sense to get depends on where you live and who you live with. Hi-fi gear takes up space and needs to be played around 60-70 dbA at point of listening - the volume of the human voice or my steel-string acoustic guitar. CDs take up space. This is fine for someone in their own house, but if you are sharing with your family or three other people in a large flat, you may want to go for streaming through your iDevice and a decent DAC into some head-fi, or noise-cancellers. How easily small feet can snag fat power cables: young children and £2,000 of Kef LS50 II's on stands are an accident waiting for an insurance company to decline. I have a small terraced house, and even speakers with only 85 db/watt-metre are way too loud with one watt going through them. Any more that 40 watts / channel is just silly. If I lived in a larger house a few yards from my neighbours, I could crank up the volume and an 80 watt / channel amp might be an idea. The WAF is a real thing: only single men can rejoice in stacks of blank boxes joined with gnarly cable, leading to a pair of speaker towers that look like some weird bird.

My core listening is CD. I already had a lot of CDs before streaming became worth having. I like certain eras of classical music that are not well-represented on Spotify, and might not be on Naxos. The same can be said for a number of EDM / House / Trance artists. Maybe if Spotify had every Bedrock and Digweed CD, I would think again. CDs are bought by browsing, which is something I will write about, that simply cannot be done online yet. While 320kps is perfectly acceptable, there's nothing quite like a CD for quality. And CDs will work even when Talk-Talk decides to not supply broadband.

Every now and then I buy a CD of some contemporary composer's music. If I picked their name and listened to something on Spotify, I would navigate away briskly. If I buy it, I have to put in some time listening to justify the expense. Kalevi Aho is never going to be on repeat, but I like what I bought of his more than I did a while ago. I would never have gone back to it if I had streamed a sample. I find, and you may differ, that the price of a CD gives me a little skin in the game of musical exploration.

I do not have an AM/FM tuner anymore, since all radio stations also stream. I have streaming because it offers what is in effect an advert-free range of radio stations: 80's, folk, jazz, classical, 60's, whatever. I can hear new releases, and I can use it on the train. (Spotify seems to cache an album, since it goes on playing even when I'm in the London Underground.) I can also play different music in different rooms over my Sonos gear. Sometimes I buy downloads from Amazon, but not the CD, and that's why I also rip my CDs (to AAC) so I have all 'my' music, that I've paid for, in one place. I have CDs because that is my preferred listening experience. Above all, it lets me play songs and artists that I used to have in my collection, still like to hear now and again, but are not part of how I listen now.

I have hi-fi speakers for the main room, Sonos Ones for the rooms where music is a background, and a Beam for the TV. I have Bose noise-cancellers I used to use in the office, Sony XM3 in-ears, and Sennheiser HD650 as head-fi. It's all about flexibility, the right technology for the circumstances. The more the merrier.

And sometime in 2023 when all this is over and I don't have to be in bed at 21:30, I will go to concerts again.

At Last! The Speaker Upgrade (KEF LS50)

First, sort out your speaker set-up.

Second, sort out the room, at least a bit. You may want to hold off on thousand-pound acoustic panels and bass-traps.

Third, get to know the sound of your new, improved music collection.

Fourth, work out what's missing or wrong with the new, improved sound. That will take a month or so.

Now you can think about upgrading.

UPGRADE THE SPEAKERS FIRST. (Says everyone.) Assuming your amp and sources are at least a decent mid-fi.

Look at what the professionals have in the background of their YT sets.

Almost all of them have had a pair of KEF LS50's on display at one time or another. Paul McGowan has a pair.

John Darko said that if you can get a pair of the originals (not the Meta) at a decent discount, that would be the deal of the year.

Guess what? Sevenoaks Hi-Fi are or were selling them at a 33% discount, with an effective 28-day trial period.

(Pauses to read debit card details over the phone.)

Two days later they arrived (and I still can't get anyone to look at double-glazing after a month).

I already know where to put them, so I swap out the B&W 686's.

Select Bruckner 5. Press play.

Holy ****.

The violins are on the left. The cellos are on the right. The horns are on the left and to the centre. There are instruments I hadn't heard before. I can play it louder without it being painful. And nobody in the orchestra gets up and wanders over to the corner of the room.

These things are so clear they even make sense, okay, almost makes sense, of Shoreline (7/4), which I swear was especially mixed to defeat the best stereo systems ever made. I could actually play that Broken Social Scene CD without wincing.

Bedrock's Signals became a shimmering, echoing delight.

I have Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony 1 playing now. Each instrument is distinct, each note has a beginning, a middle and an end. In that order.

The difference is about the same as the difference between a three year-old Ford Mondeo and a Jaguar XF.

Some things really are better than others.

Why Orchestral Music Doesn't Sound Super-Sharp On Any Hi-Fi

To understand how and why orchestral music sounds on hi-fi, first understand how orchestras are seated.

 

The bass is on the right (as the listener sees it), the mid-range in the middle, and the treble on the left. All the loud noise is on the right, and all the delicate sounds are at the top or on the left. Orchestral instruments are also loud<;, which is why a classical solo violinist can fill the Albert Hall without an amplifier. A full-strength orchestra at high volume can be over 100 dB. And nobody else gets heard when the brass section lets loose.

A lot of orchestral pieces have passages where a theme or phrase is passed from one group of instruments to another with slight variations: from flutes to clarinets to oboes to violins to bassons. A lot of those groups are between the middle and the left and half-way up the soundstage.

As I write there's a particularly soulful bit of Bruckner going on. It's all in the darker tones: middle C and lower: violas, cellos, oboe, clarinets. All in the middle and right.

If the composer has the orchestra playing a chord around middle C across the instrumental groups, the result will be a splotch across the soundstage. Because the instruments are literally positioned across the soundstage.

There are maybe two or three orchestras in the world, or maybe all of history, with string sections that change notes within a millisecond of each other, and all hit the exact same position on their (fretless) fingerboards. Seriously. Same with the wind players: it might be the same horn, but there will be tiny differences in the moment they start playing and in their breathing. The orchestral sound has smear built right into it. That's why it's such a relief when just one or two instruments play a soprano phrase: it sounds precise.

And this is before we even consider the difference between the way smaller ensembles are recorded - with one mic per instrument and other sound isolating methods - and the way orchestras are recorded with Decca trees and two other mics each side high up to add width.

If you are used to Nils Frahm, John Digweed or even Corelli and Bach, and then listen to even the best recording of Bruckner or Schumann, you're going to think something just went wrong with your hi-fi.

Nope. That's what orchestras sound like. All that gear that picks apart every bit of the sound and separates it from the others? Not going to work on the London Symphony Orchestra at full blast in Wagner. Many of the hi-fi reviewers are into rock, indie, jazz, electronica and perhaps some contemporary composed music: that stuff is well-treated by the kit they review. Heck, my mid-range system sounds fabulous when fed Nils Frahm, Chico Hamilton or John Jenkins. Not so sharp with even a modern recording of Dvorak or Bruckner, though much better now I have the speakers well-positioned, but I can't un-pick the clarinets from the oboes.

Loudspeaker Happiness and Soundstage - At Last

What, you thought I'd given up with futzing about with the speakers? When we last left, I had the balance turned over to the left as I faced the speakers. This stopped the feeling that the music was coming from somewhere around the back right corner of the room.

But having the balance wound over is not natural. So I went on reading hi-fi sites of dubious quality, until I ran across one run by an actual sound engineer who wrote like he had studied physics, and he said that my speakers needed to be at least 5cm from the wall but no more than a metre, as there was a dead zone between one and three metres from the back wall. Aha! So I'm okay with that.

Another said that my speakers needed to be at least three feet from the side walls. Fumbles for tape measure in toolbox. One was three foot from the wall, but the other was only 18 inches. Could that make a difference? I moved it.

Whoa! Suddenly the musicians were in the space between the speakers, not wandering down my right-hand wall. And I could return the balance to neutral, as God intended it should be.

The standard wisdom on placement has you the listener between the speakers as three points in an equilateral triangle. I can't do that in my room. But yet another article said, well, shelf speakers should be about 4 feet apart, but standmounts should be at least 8 feet apart. And don't forget a little bit of toe-in.

Grabs tape measure. Nearly six feet apart. Okay, what do I have to lose except my sanity? So I shuffled the speakers along the shelves by moving some books, tweaked a bit of toe-in, sat down and...

Oh yeah rock and roll!

You know when the reviewers talk about a tight, well-defined and clear soundstage and that thing where if everything is set up right, the speakers should feel as if they are not actually conveying sound?

It's all true.

I was streaming an Evelyn Glennie CD the other night, and I swear I could see every single shiny thing she was hitting, between the speakers. Mind you, that recording was probably mic'ed to within an inch of its life.

The music now stays between the speakers even if I'm concentrating on something else - though if there's a lot of sustained chords around Treble C, it does drift to the right.

I have no idea why I put up with that awful splashy, diffused sound I had before. Perhaps because I wasn't really listening, or perhaps I thought it was the gear, or perhaps I thought I would have to put baffles around the room. I did not believe that speaker placement could make such a huge difference.

But it does, and if you don't believe me, try it.