Is Jim Smith's Book"Get Better Sound"Best Book ?

I have read GBS cover to cover. It is a fine book with a common sense approach to many aspects of a "hobby" which, itself, leans toward "snake oil". How many of us have purchased the latest, greatest tweak and find that it makes no difference or, at worst, degrades our sound.

What Jim's book does for me is affirm the path which I was already going down. There are no silver bullets. No pill can make you lose 20 lbs while you sleep. There are no quick fixes.

What makes GBS a fine book is that it tells you that you don't have to spend big money to get better sound. Don't buy another piece of audio gear until you have addressed your listening environment with a few of the tips in the book.

The single biggest upgrade to my system over the last year, hell, the last ten years, was painstakingly tuning my speaker placement to my listening room. I used a method very similar to that outlined in GBS.

I set up a grid on my floor after getting my speakers close with the Sumiko Method. A few minor movements in the grid and I was blown away. It will make you angry to realize that you have wasted the potential of good equipment by not placing your speakers correctly.

I've also checked my grounds on my equipment, a GBS tip, and installed a dedicated electrical circuit for my gear, another GBS tip.

The first tip costs nothing but time. The dedicated circuit was less than $300 and yielded a bigger and deeper soundstage.

Thanks Jim.

Some may think I'm off-the-wall (maybe right!) but I approached Jim two-weeks after reading his book for a refund. He wrote back that this would be fine and gave me a return number, like #00002 and I thought, "what the heck!" I've poured so much, relatively speaking - I was a single parent for many years, into my hobby of 'listening to music' (trying to avoid buying the components to better do so with), that these forty buckeroos was money well-spent (his complimentary on-line 'Quarterly' is IMO worth the investment, if you so will, as life-time membership fee). And I didn't want to go down in history as the one minnow swimming against the swarm - or something like that.

Jim's respective correspondence alone was well worth the investment (in this, IMO, ever more so rude and callous society), i.e., just for the consideration he gives.

As far as the contents of his book is concerned, and I am confident that I am not alone with this,

"had I had this handbook forty-five years ago I could and would have saved a considerable (by any man's estimate) amount of money, time and frustration."

Most of the contents happened to have come to me by trial, reading and correspondence, via friends or just plain luck, but again, I really would have profited (financially and emotionally) having had his "wise demeanor and helping hand" at the beginning of my trials rather than toward the end. Highly recommended!

Just wanted to share a thought on Jim's book. The best part of the book for me was the tips and suggestions and techniques for speaker placement. They helped give me a more practical approach to speaker setup because the process is more thought out than what I did before with a tape measure and such. I did use Cardas math for the placement and Jim's tips helped me refine that. But for me the best part of Jim's writing on speaker placement was knowing what to listen for when its right. That tone and dynamics are what to really listen for and to achieve. Not imaging and soundstage. Once I got the speakers in the room where I got the tone and dynamics like they REALLY should be, the result was my room was so well energized and there was a very nice 3D wall of sound that was very coherent. Imaging and staging were really secondary at that point. One of the reasons I was able to get this was because I believed in what Jim wrote and wasn't afraid to put my speakers close together. Putting them closer together went against what I believed. And sure the Cardas math resulted in the same thing, but I wouldn't likely put them THAT close together if it wasn't for Jim's writing on the subject. Glad I got the book. I don't even feel like I need room treatment now, but I know I probably would benefit from it.

Now I'm going to put to test his suggestions on gear placement and move my rack out from between the speakers.

Bryan

I bought Jim's book a few months back for help in setting up my listening room, currently being remodeled. Waiting for my dedicated room to be ready I thought I'd experiment over at my father-in-law's house.

His system is one cobbled together off eBay: Carver amps, home-brew PC music server, older Sunfire preamp/processor, Pyle speakers, etc. I started by reading random excerpts from Jim's book as I wandered around the front 1/3 of the room, listening for a change in the quality of my voice while my father-in-law sat in the listening chair.

Once the general "sweet spot" was found I moved onto the masking tape grid for the floor. Carefully measured teh exact centerline for the room, ran perpendicular taping off the centerline into the "sweet spot" area and positioned the (admittedly cheap) Pyle speakers. Used Jim's makeup mirror trick to figure out where to position some 1" acoustic foam against the walls to deaden first reflection point...

Sat down to listen and was stunned. The soundstaging was absolutely immense! Male vocals were not chesty, female vocals weren't edgy or shrill. Bass wasn't lumpy.

Sure, the Pyles still had their significant shortcomings but YOWZAH they had never sounded as good as they did after following Jim's setup advice. Dad was grinnin' thinking his system was now on par with my Wilson/Boulder/dCS/Transparent setup. (Of course not, but his did sound, easily, twice as good as it did 2 hours before we started.)

I am truly impressed with Jim's book. Can't wait to try it out when my remodel is done.

I've known Jim Smith since the mid '70s, when he was Sales Manager with Magnepan. He has been in every phase of the high end audio business, plus being an audiophile himself. All of this experience is brought out in his book. It is well written and worth reading, even for us who have been at it for a long time. There are things that I forget that his book reminds me of, and then there are some things that I've never thought of that are worthwhile to try. I always think that there is more to learn and more to obtain from something that means a great deal to me, if I will just pursue it further. Jim's book allows me to pursue high end audio a bit further ... and at a reasonable price. He knows audio!