System building; a meditation

At the end of the day, all that really matters is pleasing yourself. Buy equipment you love.  The objective is to obtain equipment that lets you forget its there.  Science, art, and voodoo don’t mean a thing when you sit down to listen to a favorite album, and have a system that’s capable of enticing you into enjoying the performance, and feeling a bit like the performers are there in the room. 

I do think it’s really useful to hear a lot of different high end systems to help get a feel for what you like. Listen to stuff you can’t afford, then seek to duplicate the sound on your budget, your time line, and in your room. I also think it helps to hear a lot of live acoustic music as a reference.

"What is one’s approach to building a system out of various components that maximizes the sonic attributes of the combination of particular components?"

Rather than recite my own recent approach, I’ll just say that I wish there was a way for every audiophile to begin with their room. Some way they could listen to the room, get a sense of its acoustic character, its aesthetic limits and possibilities.

Consider: when one renovates a house or moves into a new one, the first thing one does is look at each room’s potential; should a rug go in here? A sectional or a love seat? Drapes or blinds? Queen or King bed? What color paint? Etc. The room both inspires and sets parameters for what will work in it.

Having dealt with my room last, I would love to see a process for audiophiles that builds up from the room rather than tries to troubleshoot and fix the system already set up. It could use both "rules of thumb" and some kind of easy measurement method (like REW but much more simplified).

since i jumped away from Mark Levinson and Wilson Audio in 2001, into Kharma speakers and Tenor OTL amplifiers, my guiding principle of system building has been to get the system out of the way of the music. and when i make a change in gear, or room set-up, how can what i do, not limit the music. i strongly feel that adding coloration in any one piece of gear, then robs resolution (musical truth) since you then need to balance that coloration with something in the other direction, again robbing resolution. once you have to play that game and lose resolution or energy balancing, that musical truth is lost and not recovered. and i want it all. and all the time i demand a natural presentation from the signal path like the Kharma and Tenor OTL delivered.

so that is the underlying vision i have for system building.

with my Levinson/Wilson phase i had already worked hard to optimize the room. but early on i had realized the limitations of my small room on large scale music. the room size was an obstacle to the music being all it could be. it was a limit. so......i sold my home, and found another home with a separate building, a barn, where i could build a room without restrictions that would not limit the music. i was all in. and so i built that room.

i placed my Kharma’s and Tenor amps (by this time the Tenor’s were not OTL’s but 300 watt tube hybrids) in my new room, and found that the Kharma’s did not have the ability to fill the space of that new room. so i changed speakers.

when optimizing a system the first rule is matching the speaker to the room. it does not matter how large or small your room is, but if you either can’t energize the room, or you are always overdriving the room, system potential is restricted. the speaker needs to be able to breathe (get going) so the music is not pinched. if the speaker cannot move enough air to energize the room, then the music will never be able to be intimate, and never be physical. these things are essential for connecting with the music.

part of this is making sure that the speakers and room support the music you like, but also to realize that as you go along your musical tastes are likely to expand. and maybe that includes likely larger scale music. but if your system is not comfortable to accomplish those things, you might never know or experience that. so you need to plan for your own musical growth.

as far as choosing gear, speakers and electronics, that is such a large subject it’s hard to define simply. but to me it starts with whether you have your own reference sound. mine came from the Kharma/Tenor. that......"in -between" tubes and solid state sort of natural, lively, neutral sort of sound. low noise like solid state, but natural and breath of life like tubes. coherent, relatively easy to drive speakers, but full range.

from there i always hold that template up to any gear. i’ve found that darTZeel amps and preamps hold to those views, as well as the Evolution Acoustics speakers. the Evolutions were developed from the Kharma viewpoint initially in many ways so that is no accident. and the darts also naturally followed the Tenor’s too.

as far as choosing the right driver technology, it's a very wide open subject. certain choices reduce room concerns, or also increase the room concerns. i could live with multiple different speaker types. for my own direction of having a large room and truly full frequency range, dynamic cone speakers seem to do the job perfectly. but in another life i could see owning horns or large planars. no one perfect direction.

i have a few times had phono cartridges that strayed from my ’anti-coloration’ perspective, but those were never long term choices for me. i found they were limiting to musical truth. i had a tubed dac for a year, but it also became limiting. and tried big tube amps a few years back just to make sure that direction was not for me; and it was limiting so they did not stay.

how important is the room? how serious are you? if you are all in like me, then the room becomes the key to the ultimate.

in the real world of normal domestic rooms, i think as long as the room does fit the speaker, the speaker the room, then many wonderful things can happen and most system building is supported. but lots of spendy gear thrown into the wrong room is not a good idea.

Insightful post, whart.

I've heard inexpensive and pricey speakers sound the most convincing because of THE ROOM/positioning.

No cable or tweak thingy is ever going to take place of the 2 most basic requirements for seeking "the truth".

Your question is very broad and as you allude, I also don’t think there is a correct answer.

My system morphed into what it is today over a period of decades. I would never have dreamt I’d be where I am today when I started off. I also use SET amps now, but back then I thought SET owners were kinda "weird"; why pay more for a 3.5WPC with a very high THD when you get get a 200WPC with low THD for a lot less?

Needless to say I don’t think so anymore.

I do find it interesting that it does seem as though not a single person has a system that matches somebody else’s. In a sense our hobby is a very powerful expression of individualism.