Gary SteelGARY STEEL discovers that when setting up a stereo system, just one dumb decision can have horrific results.
We’d planned the move for months. When a former tenant had trashed the flat on the ground floor of our house the wife had discovered her DIY talents and set to, feverishly cleaning and painting. A decision had been made.
For the past five years, the master bedroom had been my hi-fi room-cum-office while we subsisted in a small bedroom. But when our 10-year-old decided she would no longer sleep in the same room in a bunk bed with her 6-year-old brother, she’d moved into a tiny sliver of a room that was only really any good as a storage space. Things had to change. The downstairs room, formerly let out, would become my new hi-fi room-cum-office, and we’d get the family sleeping quarters sorted.
My new hi-fi room looked good. It was more square than oblong, but my only real worry was the preponderance of reflective surfaces, with a large window/sliding door on the side of the room and culminating in the tiled floors. I knew there would be some acoustic treatments required, but I didn’t expect the severity of the problem that I was to encounter.
First, though, all the gear had to be moved downstairs, which, rather than negotiate a narrow internal staircase, meant carrying each item around the outside pathway on a rainy weekend. Thanks to my wife, whose muscles are stronger than mine due to years of competitive swimming, we were able to slowly lug the items to their new space, waiting for breaks in the weather (and lucky not to get rained on). It was an excruciating process, and I ached for days afterwards, but somehow, we managed even the heaviest items. While the TV was heavy, my Martin Logan Summit speakers were easily the trickiest proposition, given their combination of weight and shape. Would it have been more sensible to put them back in their boxes? We opted for a buggy on wheels with a good deal of cushioning and a very slow, methodical transport, as just one mistake could mean a broken speaker, and this 2005 model doesn’t grow on trees.
With everything in place, I cranked up the system and… horror of horrors, there was no treble AT ALL. The sound was completely muffled. What the heck? Had we shaken the circuitry of the speakers or the amp on its voyage to its new downstairs venue? As both speakers were behaving the same way, initially I blamed my JAVA amp. Or had I just done something really dumb, like putting one of the cables in a socket it wasn’t designed for? Stupidly, I was quick to post my trauma to social media, asking for potential solutions on Witchdoctor’s own NZ Audiophile Forum page, along with a Martin Logan-dedicated page.
Expert advice rolled in. The speakers are too wide apart. The speakers are too close together. The speakers are too far from the wall. The speakers are too close to the wall. The curtains are too heavy. Basement rooms never sound good. You’ll never get a good sound in this room. You need bass traps. You need to follow this complicated speaker set-up procedure, which is mathematically precise but almost impossible to for a mere mortal to understand. Etc.
I was so depressed by the situation that I gave up, temporarily. I sank into my despair. I could barely step into my new hi-fi room. Had I made a TERRIBLE mistake? Had all the work preparing and moving the stuff been to no avail? Would we have to move back out of the master bedroom into the former cramped space? Would the complaining 10-year-old have to go back to her sliver-of-a-bedroom? It was all too much to deal with. And on top of everything else, Wi-Fi coverage in the new hi-fi room was dicey, because having moved the internet router and its joined-at-the-hip mesh extender, the extender just wouldn’t connect again. Gah!!!
The next day, I finally braved the room again, having had a couple of thoughts. I’d had the bright idea that trying a different amp would clarify where the problem lay. I tried to pair my standby AVM power amp with a wee Topping desktop DAC/preamp, but here’s the thing: despite having been a hi-fi nut for decades and even edited a hi-fi magazine, I’m technically challenged, and I couldn’t figure out how to set the Topping or to get it working with the AVM, despite spending hours browsing online and watching YouTube tutorials. So I gave up on that.
I decided to try another couple of procedures. First, I moved my JAVA amp and Antipodes K21 server/streamer back onto the proper hi-fi rack. (I’d placed them under the TV because my lovely Transparent speaker cables need about another metre to allow my Summits to be moved around for optimum placement. So, if the amp’s right in the middle, ample movement is available. If it wasn’t for the TV panel, I could have the rack in the middle, but that’s not an option.) The sound seemed a fraction better with the amp on a solid piece of furniture, but the essential problem remained. The sound wasn’t just in need of acoustic paneling or different speaker placement, it was TOTALLY FUCKED. (Excuse the language, but sometimes…)
Next, on a whim, I took out the rubbery plastic square (taken from one of those kids’ jigsaw floor mats) that I’d placed under the speaker to be able to move it around more easily on the tiled floor. (I had figured that the mat might take the edge of the reflective floor surface, but it was mostly to help speaker movement/placement.) By this stage, I figured that there must be a major fault and that no amount of jiggery-pokery would fix the essential problem.
You know what I’m going to write next, don’t you? I tentatively switched on the power and placed a platter in my CD player (the streamer still wasn’t working, remember?) and… OH. MY. GOD. Camera! Lights! Action! It sounded wonderful. There was no problem with the sound whatsoever.
It turned out that the single source of my sound problem was the child’s mats. Who would have thought? One commenter had told me to get rid of the mat, but the inference wasn’t so much that it would be DESTROYING the sound as that it was simply something cheap and nasty that I should replace with proper, expensive speaker feet. The wife then reminded me that I had a couple of wooden chopping boards that I had at some stage used under the speakers to be able to slide them into position, so I retrieved those from under the house, and the sound improved even more.
The long and the short of it is that the room sounds FANTASTIC. The sonic issues I was expecting to encounter are non-existent. My previous hi-fi room sounded inexplicably good, but this is better. Before, there was a hollowness to the wood floor, which was directly above the garage. The new room has a really solid floor, and I’m picking that makes the difference. The image of my Martin Logan Summits is out of this world down here, along with their smoothness throughout their range. My JAVA integrated amp produces a clarity that is accentuated even further by the room, and I know it’s a hi-fi cliché, but even the few records I’ve subsequently played have had surprises in store for me. Playing Talk Talk’s The Colour Of Spring, at one point I heard a very subtle horn section on one tune that I’d never even noticed before… and this is coming from a person (me!) who wrote a book about Talk Talk! Check that out here.
As it happens, I’m reading a book about “Laughing” Leonard Cohen at the moment, and one of the first platters I listened to in my new space was his 1968 debut, Songs Of Leonard Cohen. It’s by no means an audiophile delight, but the remastered version is nicely produced and once again, there was a level of detail retrieval that I’d never experienced in my previous hi-fi room.
What can I take away from this hi-fi nightmare/experience? Well, clearly, I shouldn’t have freaked out. Having encountered the problem, I should probably have gone for a long walk or had a glass of wine or a chill pill. Should I have known that the rubbery kids’ mat would kill the sound? Well, not really. But that’s probably the first thing I should have eliminated.
Yes, I’d love to have great sound that looks as simple as the picture at the top of this page makes it seem. One loudspeaker, hot gal! But we know that setting up a stereo takes a bit more graft than that.
I’m grateful to all the experts and longtime hi-fi fans who weighed in with their opinions, and just amazed that ultimately, the room I thought would be a bit of a sonic challenge sounds great from the get-go. There are probably still sonic improvements to be made, and I will look at getting some bass traps and other treatments in time, but I’m beyond happy that I’ve got music back. Being deprived of my usual sonic goodness was no fun at all, and the experience has reinforced my recognition of just how fantastic it is to hear music in all its full-spectrum dynamic glory. And lo and behold, I’ve also got my lovely Antipodes K21 connected and working again, which lets me access that wonderful world of hi-res streaming via Roon/Qobuz. Happy!
