Yes-mind Zen. Despite its M not L or XL res, Vintage Oslo was plenty keen to spell out different output stages between COS H1, Auralic Vega and Questyle CAS192 converters. No doubt Vega's was the most organic and dense. For my more aspirated tastes coming off Midi 120, Questyle's most lit-up personality intersected best with Jarek's own valve-educated aesthetic. Remember how Oslo takes no wired digital signal. Rather than pass on minute differences between whatever serves as digital transport in this league, it digs into bigger differences of wired analog outputs despite subsequent DSP.

Spotify streaming Fahir Atakoglu's For Love album.

To raise up image height to the center of my high screen, I added a spare footer beneath each Oslo spacer. This aimed each driver axis directly at each ear to also benefit the treble. Below is my final desktop setup. In my seat with the keyboard tray pulled out, neither speaker showed any side wall. This made it face-on toe in for the most focused edge-to-edge soundstage superimposed on my curved screen. What had started out more amorphous and vague on image lock and layering had morphed into an unexpectedly well-mapped soundstage.

So Jarek's set'n'forget concept still benefits from setup care to show at its best. Just making sound gives a faucet a quarter turn to see water trickle and shout out a victorious "it works". Not. Eternal renters like us check on maximum water pressure to enjoy proper gush factor before we sign any lease. Same here. Turning the sonic faucet all the way up takes attention to detail.

Having an old-fashioned rotary volume knob on the front of the right speaker is super convenient in the nearfield.

Then even simple things like this track come together with unexpectedly satisfying results.

At 10:00 on Oslo's pot, I had SPL as high as I'd ever use on my work desk. Strangely, I didn't miss the Midi 120. In many ways here those are overkill. This spoke loudly to Jarek's well-judged balancing act as written to his sound-processor chip. While compared to the posh Fram this simple speaker does shave off a bit of bandwidth on top and bottom, this doesn't upset the overall balance one bit. Nor do Fram's greater output reserves factor on the desktop nor its higher resolution matter much. That's the whole point. The only one crying will be the spec hunter. The one who does the actual listening will smile instead. Ignorance really can be bliss.

Hey, no-mind Zen after all. The key is to trust your ears. Don't let your eyes and associated assumptions decide on their behalf. If your mind just must intrude—doesn't it always—have it say right tool for the job. On the desk, you're not doing 90dB SPL or organ workouts to 20Hz. You won't tolerate big-speaker clutter. This application wants perfectly balanced sound, high intelligibility at low-to-medium levels, sufficient bass reach to feel complete, no annoying thinness on compressed data like Spotify and compact boxes. For Vintage Oslo, that's a perfectly happy quintet of checks.