A new sound room. Will it make your hardware sing like the fat lady? Will it take the same interminable patience to get there? Will it mean serious revoicing or worse, new speakers? The gamut is broad, of anxieties and possibilities facing the ambitious audiophile who just moved house. With our recent relocation to Ireland's west coast being our 10th home in the 4th country since 6moons went live, I had some experience prejudging a space still occupied by its former tenants filled with all of their furniture and décor. You listen to your own voice and foot fall whilst walking about. You clap your hands checking for slap echo. You contemplate dimensions and possible layouts. But to actually move in, set up and flick the switch (not to Better Call Saul's nuclear option but to your system for the very first time) is still a nervy moment. Where is Saul to de-escalate things when preconceptions abound, about hard surfaces, windows, gabled ceilings and large spaces? Those ingredients all predict bloomy reverberant acoustics and concomitant time smear. Such behaviour would run counter to the often overstuffed, quite damped hence drier living rooms which double as the sound rooms most audiophiles use. I invariably get knowing emails condemning a new space purely on optics; or at least questioning my choice in no uncertain ways. As one of the fewer reviewers whose entire livelihood hinges on writing about hifi, a listening space is an obvious part of my tool box. Using dull tools isn't merely unprofessional. It's a major kink when you love your work. Granted, one mustn't make the world's best sound; which would be what, exactly? One does however have to make sound that is representative, intelligent and enjoyable. Representative means on par with good show demos (and yes, there are many bad show demoes too). Intelligent means being informative about or translucent to hardware changes to be an effective reviewing tool. Enjoyable is a soft term. It means different things to different people. Here we merely say that having turned a hobby into a job means that if enjoyment went south, the rationale for doing the job would as well. Having a useful sound room is key.

After a few very instructive hours of playing footsies with speakers and chair placement alike, I can already report the following about this very large new 5.5 x 15 metres space. Whether I close or not the heavy 100% light-proof double curtains on the inner front-wall French doors makes no difference I can hear. Closing the outer curtains to only leave the inner glass panels exposed benefits the upper bass; some. Far more critical—and I mean make or break—is the listening chair's position on the room's long axis. This in fact is even more important than exactly how far the speakers sit from the front wall though that too makes a difference. Yet the chair's location is priority #1. It must avoid occupying a longitudinal standing-wave peak in the lower midrange/upper bass. Having actual metres of options to move this chair front and back, it didn't take long to identify a front-wall distance that gave me the most even response. Once that was locked in, I could experiment with the speakers' distance from the same wall; then the most efficacious toe-in.

With two months passed, I'd worked my way through most resident boxes and penned various reviews including speakers by Apertura, Casta, Gryphon and RDAcoustics. An easy conclusion? In these livelier acoustics, non-ported speakers worked best. Unless one has actual comparators on hand—or effectively stuffs one's port holes—it's nearly impossible to distinguish between room modes and self-inflicted port effects. With comparators, I concluded that my favourite personal speaker in this room was the Albedo Audio Aptica. Preceded by the Fore Audio DAISy1 tube DAC and Vinnie Rossi's Lio configured as purist AVC preamp feeding the Pass Labs XA30.8, it ticked off all my boxes. To gild the lily just because I could, I added the EnigmAcoustics Sopranino super tweeters on their optional custom stands to reduce height to that of the Aptica ceramic treble cones. With longer distances to walls and ceiling, the high treble didn't mind a bit of reinforcement.

Though it reads implausible considering the small mid/woofer, addition of Zu's Submission sub was questionable. Yes it added some 1st-octave assist if I was very careful on the gas but the 40-60Hz region still got a bit too heavy. On balance, I preferred the speakers pure. I clearly was the beneficiary of generous LF support from the room itself. More reverberant acoustics also preferred faster drier transducers and restraint with any upstream injection of density. That's how the transformer-attenuator passive preamp could edge out the tubed Nagra Jazz and also give drier more articulate bass.

In some ways the most important insight gained was also the most fleeting. A few days into it, one can no longer resurrect a tacit untainted first impression of what the room really sounds like. The computational power of our brain's constant interpolation activity is so great that it overwrites/deletes what came before. It has to. We'd otherwise suffer complete and utter overload. What was new and potentially jarring quickly becomes the new normal. We've adjusted. It doesn't mean that one is less critical. It simply acknowledges that true objectivity is impossible. No matter how much we might desire it, we can never return to the tabula rasa of first encountering a new acoustic and hearing it fresh. With this our 10th listening room since site launch, I'm confident that anyone believing otherwise kids themselves and grossly underestimates the fluency and adaptability of our perception. It's like walking into a childhood photo attempting to revive the scene with its limited visual cues. At best we'd do it with an adult's perspective that distorts memory. We can never again experience whatever that photo froze in time as we did back then: as an infant or teenager...