Bring on the B? Working my way through 15 albums temporarily parked in my Spotify Premium 'Your Library' panel, I didn't think much of crosstalk cancellation for low-rez streaming. Yes I heard a bit more recorded ambiance in the depth domain and occasionally a tad wider staging but at a perceived minor cost to image focus. It triggered no lust bumps, no 'Aha', no greater envelopment of speakers leaning forward for a virtual hug. Nothing moved closer or suddenly situated outside the speakers. As usual with my free-space setup, the soundstage unfurled far behind the speakers to seemingly invade Ivette's adjoining office through the front wall. I'd much rather have 1'411kbps resolution than 320kbps + BACCH. For any main system listening not casual exploratory music chases, I'd in fact insist on it. Big things trump tiny things. But Martijn had promised to rustle up some spare Roon ribs so I suspended my gavel in mid air until I could experience BACCH at full even high resolution. Just then I felt like (cough!) driving budget retreads. So I was told to contact Rob Darling of Harman. This powerful Samsung subsidiary had acquired Roon Labs late last year. Hopefully he could issue me temporary log-in credentials.

In the far lower right you see the Plugins logo active and above it, the slider for BACCH engaged. One mouse click and it's defeated for instant A/B from the seat.

Big B. Now playing at up to 4'608kbps with for example the below Dhafer Youssef album, with/out switching could be far more significant. The extent depended on the recording. On Sounds of Mirrors, recorded venue ambience got noticeably more reverberant. The resultant wetter textures and denser connective tissue between sounds acted as my quasi Hypex antidote. A typical side effect was somewhat bloomier images less focused but bigger and more billowy. On busier recordings like Randy Tico's brilliant Earth Dance or Martin Fröst's faux Vivaldi clarinet concertos on Sony Classical, I found the effect less natural. Now I thought it more phasey bordering on swimmy. Regardless, switching the Choueiri algo in and out made definitive differences even where I preferred without. If you're a soundstage freak, far more decisive than the algorithm is proper free-space speaker setup for deliberately reduced room interaction. Then the algo can be a cherry on top. But the actual cake is proper speaker positioning, period. That's what sets up attainable width, depth and minimized room interference.

I heard BACCH primarily as a textural wetness injector which lengthened the recorded acoustic's reverb time. In the most basic of terms, what was dry and absorptive became more wet and reflective. That generated more audible space. After all, space equals emptiness aka silence. We can't hear either. What we do hear are recorded reflections flickering through space behind/around the primary images like a comet trail lights up a night sky. If we eliminate all reflections, images appear like razor-edged cut-outs. Once we add the right amount of reverb, textures get more elastic, edges soften and a venue other than our own appears. If we inject too much reverberance, it's like jackhammers in a cathedral. What should be sharply delineated individual attacks becomes an echoic washed-out blur. Based on trialling some 20 recordings, my hit rate for B was ~50:50. On some albums I enjoyed the more acute spaciousness and resultant looser textures. On others I preferred the crisper focus and separation of 'au nature'. How you'd score is unpredictable. I would simply be surprised if you had no reaction. On CD-quality or higher resolution, I found the effect rather demonstrable. With €999 for the license, a 10-day trial period would help determine its practical value for individual users. I'd thus recommend that Dutch & Dutch think about offering some form of cooling-off period.

It's predictable regardless that a certain percentage of the audience will cringe at €1K for a plugin because it's invisible lines of code. What they miss are the thousands of man hours of R&D behind said code. Others don't think twice over spending many times that on a single 1m power cord. Regardless of where we come down, BACCH can't create something from nothing. Whatever extra spaciousness it unmasks must already be encoded in our music. Since we don't know how much our system's crosstalk presently covers up, we can't predict how much of our music library conceals a wealth of spatial data; and how much hides only marginal if any treasures. That's back at the unmasking effect's variance. What's more, the 8c only runs the universal version. Even in a best-case scenario it's not representative of full-dose individualized head-tracking BACCH which uses two in-ear not one standard microphone to take the calibration measurements..

I found my encounter with BACCH really interesting. If I owned the 8c, I'd probably opt to install the algorithm because where its effect was positive, it directly offset the speaker's drier more damped class D signature. Am I now primed to install BACCH on my iMac? With our hybrid dipoles, I already enjoy more in-room spaciousness than the smaller extra way-back enhancement of the B'd 8c. With our amplifiers, I already enjoy my ideal mix of control and fluidity. With our current room/setup, I also get such wonderful out-of-the-box imaging that I'm really not tempted to want more. Hence I don't see myself as a future BACCH user. That said, particularly if Dutch & Dutch created an opt-out period, I'd consider it a no-brainer for any buyer to take a walk on the wild side and find out how the Joneses live. Who knows, they could just develop their own BACCH Jones? There's also no denying that an active networked speaker like today's Dutch & Dutch 8c represents current hifidom's outermost smart edge. It previews a future when that approach will be the accepted status quo and classic separates outré outliers. "We're searching for participants to help develop EarEQ, a new 8c plugin. Its goal is to correct the 8c's output for a listener's individual loudness perception, including how it can be impacted by potential hearing loss and age. All you need to participate is a pair of 8c. We're looking for people of all ages, with or without possible hearing loss. The research will be conducted in close partnership with experienced psychoacoustics experts. Selected participants will receive a complimentary lifetime EarEQ license, provided that the research leads to successful plugin development."

Because on Redbook and hi-rez fare BACCH can have a very robust effect, our entire music library clearly contains data we previously never mined. If nothing more, that realization alone should upset been-there done-that types. I found it a bit like being married for 30 years to only then learn that my partner wasn't just strangely fortunate but truly psychic to accurately preview the outcome of decisions rather than book an annoying parade of lucky hunches. In short, there's more to how basic speaker stereo works than I knew; and more info in my music files than I've heard before. After 25 years of observant music playback, that admittedly came as a surprise!

PS: Could an imaginary BACCH ad campaign rightfully claim, "you've never heard what's on your recorded music until now"? I believe it could. However, this would almost certainly not be what the artists intended. Unless the recording and mastering engineers used BACCH, their very deliberate crafting of the recorded acoustic used standard not enhanced playback to monitor microphone placement and electronic reverb injection, image positioning and layout. Just because the algorithm can find hidden space cues doesn't at all equate to the artists intending them. What they intended to be encoded was measured and weighed without BACCH. It's what we and they have heard all along. This fundamental dichotomy could explain why my hit ratio was just 50%. If the recording artists didn't implicitly intend for BACCH to be applied, should we add it and think ourselves smarter or creatively more informed than the people who actually make our music? It's a fair question.