Thanks to Juan of @blisshifi for Greatly Improving My Listening Pleasure

A big thanks to Juan of @blisshifi.

Juan helped to guide me through my purchase of both a phono preamp and streamer.  He has been an excellent source of support  as an audiophile enthusiast first and dealer second.  I would now call him a friend.

Juan was in Dallas this weekend for the Southwest Audio Fest and offered to drive over one hour to meet and as it turns out, transform my system.  I think that he has some form of supernatural abilities with tuning two channel systems.  My Wilson Audio dealer setup my listening geometry and speaker placement/orientation.  Another dealer sold me/setup my turntable and MySonic cartridge.  I didn’t try to alter any of this.  He subtly moved my speakers, then decided to move the listening distance and once again adjusted the speakers.  He worked to better integrate my subwoofers and through each step he had me listen to the result.  In the end, my speakers totally disappeared and the soundstage extended above, behind and way to sides of the speakers.  Pinpoint imaging greatly improved and there was a greater fullness to the music.  He identified a weakness in my system being a bit of excessive high end and said that it might be due to my D/A converter.  The next morning I realized that a year ago after a hearing test found that my sensitivity over 8K was severely impacted, I engaged my integrated amp’s equalizer and boosted the 10K filter by a bit.  For me, this resulted in a much better clarity with some music and revealed more detail.  Unfortunately, I forgot that it was engaged.  That said, I believe that their is a bit of electronic hash in the top end that probably doesn’t come from the equalizer.  

Then we moved to my analog, which represents a much greater investment of money and Juan was shocked that the soundstage was collapsed and it didn’t sound right.  When he looked at the tonearm I could hear him saying to himself, “what the hell”.  It seems that the tonearm wasn’t setup and in fact the VTA was drastically off and likely caused excessive wear of the stylus.  After putting things right with the setup things were much improved, but will take a good bit of time to sound better as the stylus wears in. I reluctantly spent $10K on just my cartridge.  For me, that was a small fortune.  My dealer reassured me that they spend extra time setting up the high end cartridges and that their technician had years of experience, so I got lazy and didn’t check things out for myself given my limited knowledge of turntable/arm/cartridge setup.  So, I should have double checked everything and I didn’t.  I’m quite disappointed in my dealer.

On a more positive note, it was a real joy to meet Juan and am grateful for his  expertise and the many hours spent righting my system. He made sure that I could  hear the difference at each stage of his tuning.  On top of that, Juan was so very pleasant on a personal level.  I plan on relying on Juan as my audio needs change and will say hi from time to time…. Thank Juan