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The remainder of the process involves tweaking and tailoring the system's response to best suit the customer's sonic tastes, loading an operational set of alternatives into the four Profile slots, ensuring the customer is conversant with the operation of the gear and some generalized housekeeping to store archival copies of the project information for both future tuning and disaster recovery should either of those needs arise. And as you and Pete both know very well, the devil's in the details.


Stephæn. The next day I felt compelled to fire off a thank-you note. It was an e-card with some toddler speaking in an adult male’s British accent: "Us DEQX newbies here in Eastern WA want to take a moment to say a super big thanks for your diligence, stamina and willingness to answer endless questions on a Sunday. You offered more than a dozen suggestions which can only be the product of a lot of experience and plain old smarts. I doubt we would have discovered them on our own even after numerous attempts. Especially impressive is the way you are not brash with the amazing degree of control available at your hands, instead going for more organic lines in your corrections. It was a genuine pleasure. See ya next time." In early July we had another two-hour remote session. The goals were to develop two EQ contours, one which would make the system warmer, another which would make the system friendlier to poor recordings.

The essentials. With that accomplished we were able to dedicate more time to listening to music, eating good food and refueling our ‘grain storage facilities’. Everyone who spends some time here has remarked positively on the improvements in musicality of the setup. One observation, particularly telling, came from a friend who has experienced all of my gear in all of my rooms over the last 22 years. I will preface his comment by saying it has often been noted that our minds do a great job of adjusting to the sound that emanates from various audio systems. You might say that we do our own corrections as it were. But that comes with a price. Listening should not require hard work. My friend’s comment was along the lines of surprise at how relaxed he was. He noticed that his mind no longer had to work to do the ‘compensation’ when listening to the DEQX-ed system. "My entire being could relax and just soak it in."

While I had the same experience, I frequently encountered results that were startling as well. When timing, phase and amplitude accuracy are restored and the room is properly integrated—not corrected as that tends to produce a harsh result—significant surprises await 'round many unexpected corners. There must be dozens of time since the installation where I've heard myself saying ‘that sounds so … so right.’


As I think back over 35 years of chasing the musical dragon, I can say that only a handful of products I purchased have either 1) become essential, 2) deserve heaps of praise for cost effectiveness or 3) really deliver such musically influential and enduring improvements that I would be distraught were they taken away. In this last category fall the George Wright (late and also dearly missed) WPA 3.5 monoblocks with TFA-204 nickel output transformers. Immediately. Their OPTs were butt-stacked with an air-gap spacer by none other than Mike LaFevre. He noted that mine "are really numerically quite rare. We've maybe made three or four pairs of these (by memory) over all of the 22 or 23 years I've been making transformers." Some have argued that it would be very difficult to find a transformer with a sweeter midrange. I lucked out for certain when a friend stumbled upon the amps and secured them for me. At that time neither of us knew that their transformers were special but when I went to test the amp in my system, there was no doubt that they were not only different but quite special. When used at the heart of a tri-amped system they deliver broader and more authentically expressive tonal reach in the midband than the already wonderful stock WPA 3.5 units. Also in this category are the ecstasy-grade oil-filled motor-run capacitors we used in our crossover network for the Altec 604 Dream project.


In the 'essential' category is the sonic grace bestowed upon my entire system by the Grand Prix Audio isolation racks upon which my gear—including the 2A3s— still rests. And the ecstasy-grade oil-filled motor-run capacitors. Without them I doubt I would have fallen in love with and kept those speakers we spent the better part of a year building. By the way those magical caps are a three-time winner as they also qualify for the bang-for-the-buck award. As does the lowly Denon 103 cartridge. Which brings us back, momentarily, to the Behringer. At a price of $350 it can’t be denied as a screaming deal. Plus it has worked well for many many people with less complicated setups. It was certainly worth a try. Its crossover, time alignment and EQ functions enabled me to enjoy my system until I could come up with the scratch for the full deal. As we discussed earlier it can’t compute the speaker drivers’ correction filters and then combine those elements with the other system parameters to configure an optimized loudspeaker array. As Edgar Kramer pointed out in his very instructive review/tutorial on the DEQX 2.6P, "according to DEQX, from a technical standpoint and apart from acoustical problems relating to the listening room, the loudspeaker is the weakest link in the audio chain. It suffers errors in the form of distortion, phase accuracy and frequency response that are roughly ten times worse than that of any other equipment or media in the audio chain."