With Akiko's pigtails finished in bananas on each end to butt heads with my Vermöuth Audio speaker cables, my haunted hifi cemetery unearthed a matching set of banana/spade-terminated jumpers sufficiently long to park Aramis at half mast below these solid-cherry sound|kaos monitors with built-in LessLoss inline passive noise filters. Mindful of the instructions, I left this setup untouched for 10 days whilst playing music during working hours.

I also put Acelec's Model One to good use. Those don't feature built-in noise filtering like the above Swiss. In theory that'd make them more responsive to Aramis; a suspicion I wanted to test. To show what the Dutch noise traps look like tie-wrapped to a stand, I did just that below. To defeat Aramis I simply unseated their banana ends of the cable. The before/after delta was modest and broadband so not specific to certain frequency ranges. If something tames a slightly sizzling treble, it's easy to note. Same for bolting on extra louder bass. Since this change seemed to spread uniformly top to bottom, I found it harder to spot. Then I noticed a shift in feel from drier/stiffer to moister/elastic. As usual, once pegged my attention knew where to focus. On the inherently bloomier wooden Vox 3awf, I simply didn't latch onto it. It took the black aluminators in their rigid cabs.

This experience and a prior review on Carbide's new Nano isolation footer prompted this separate industry feature: Some gals dig broad shoulders. Some guys are done in by long legs. These days accessories get me hot under the collar. Why is simple. Age and experience. Once we successfully match a system to a given room within our budget, we can't really improve the core hardware. We could certainly arrive again at our ideal sound by other means just for the sake of a new journey. We could easily pursue difference but are no longer interested. We love our sound just the way it is.

Once the unholy amp-speakers-room trinity is carefully curated, our ideal tonal and textural balance and desired resolution locked in, new core hardware goes sideways at best; or costs radically more to be irrelevant. With our ideal sound clearly and narrowly defined, sideways has no appeal. We've done all of it already during the lengthy bachelor period when we played the field of tubes and transistors, single-ended and push/pull, hybrids, horns, widebanders, omnis, dipoles, sat/sub systems – all the permutations that had us curious.

Should this be our status quo—a hifi that's stabilized, mature, satisfying—there's another field we may play. Cable lifts. Ground optimizers. Noise traps. Resonance control. These types of accessories often demand high system resolution before they matter enough. With high resolution in place, what under different circumstances could be negligible or zero suddenly pulls. All electrical, mechanical and acoustic noise is distortion. Diminishing noise in all of its forms strips away layers which aren't signal. Each time we do, there's more space for the signal to occupy. It's how we can improve the functioning of our core hardware without skipping the groove of our ideal sound. We just grind that groove deeper and more profound. Anything that moves our sound sideways gets rejected. By core hardware I mean gear we can't eliminate without killing the sound. By accessories I mean gear we can eliminate whilst the sound continues. At best we must rewire a broken link like reseating a USB cable in our DAC if we removed an interceding USB bridge; or plugging a power cord straight into the wall if we took out a conditioner.

Audio hobbyists can easily err by investing in accessories before their core hardware's interactions have been ideally groomed to play a given space. Too much speaker for the room should certainly get sorted before we fret over a noise trap for open XLR. Ditto a poor amp/speaker match before we investigate fibre optics. It's only when the far-from-obvious basics have been mastered that a lot of accessories can shed their voodoo status and show what they're really capable of. This obeys the proper sequence where big disturbances are handled before we fret about subtler stuff. Because some accessories are relatively cheap, they can trigger impulse purchases particularly if reviews promise amazing results. But if the reviewer already sorted all their big disturbances and we haven't yet, we may get no noteworthy results at all. Should we really worry about trimming hedges if our roof still leaks?

Back to Aramis on the desktop, my internal jury was out on cost/benefit considerations. Whilst I heard the difference of lower splashiness in trade for smoother fullness and found it perfectly benign and desirable, I knew that my Singxer SU-2 USB bridge on the same desktop had made a bigger improvement. Ditto the LHY Audio OCK-2 masterclock syncing Singxer and an iFi iDSD Pro Signature DAC. Both of those electronic accessories cost less than a pair of Akiko traps. Wearing my amateur investment broker cap, I still wanted to look for a bigger delta. Using equal parts experience and guesswork, I set up an old pair of Albedo Audio Aptica 5½" transmission-line 2-way compact towers in the bigger room. With pre-Cell Accuton drivers on 1st-order slopes, their hard ceramic membranes lean toward the well-damped accurate slightly cool side. Given where and how Aramis had spoken up on the desktop, I figured that these Italian high-resolution speakers would benefit more than our customary hybrid open-baffle Qualio IQ.