Back to the future. This is no formal review. I'm not yet qualified to write one. My goal is instead to share a special stage of my audiophile journey together with expectations, motivations, trial and error, early results and outlook. I believe that many hifi enthusiasts seasoned or green encounter similar challenges to resonate and perhaps even find some useful cues. First I need to build some personal background about what brought me to all this. As I wrote in my bio, music has nourished me since I can remember. It is for me many things emotional, physical and intellectual but perhaps its most precious value is that music is how I acknowledge and get in touch with my deepest feelings, bypassing the always active rational even cynical mind that has such a prevalent role in my personality. This is why I am attached to the inner music lover as one of my best parts. But even at this fundamental level of my nature, the aesthete self kicks in, making me react much more intensely when music presents its sound in the purest most beautiful way. I discovered this in my teens and became an audiophile well before I could afford fancy gear. But where there's a will there's a way and I managed to put together a respectable little system way back then which I enjoyed during my university years. The LS3/5a I bought used are still with me as a testimony to those endless hours of dreamy abandonment or headbanging in my tiny 3x3m room.
After graduating I immediately moved to another city to enter a long period with logistics precarious at best. Those made it impossible to cultivate a speaker rig for a few decades. When this stabilized about ten years ago, I preferred to re-enter audio through headphones mainly for lack of space. In the last decade I discovered that modern headphones can provide a level of engagement, insight and even realism I didn't suspect. This fuelled an escalation of my hardware rewarded constantly by further if not proportional elevation of both aural pleasure and objective increase of information retrieval. Thus I came to appreciate HeadFi not as an expedient to compensate my lack of speakers options. However good a headphone system may be, it still won't provide two major things at the root of my original speaker-induced awe: suspension of disbelief and a full-bodied experience of sound waves. Why I didn't sidestep headphones altogether comes down to what objectives and expectations we have for our system and the constraints under which we're forced to achieve them.
I like background music when I socialize but not with my audio rig. For me playback is a very private even egoic and most focused call. This explains why I've been so happy with headphones. My objective for speakers is to feel physically transported to the recorded venue, be it a studio, small jazz club or concert hall; and the illusion of seeing the musicians, their environment, even being able to touch them. A decent speaker system can provide this to some extent even under suboptimal conditions especially with DSP. But if the illusion is to be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing—I experienced that on rare occasions—then room acoustics, speaker placement and listening position all must satisfy relatively strict constraints. Ideally this would mean an uncompromising dedicated audio room which for me isn't an option. However, after a partial renovation of my apartment, I recently achieved conditions which felt ready to make a worthy attempt. This article is about that.
Like many mortals I live in a flat within a condo to not have the luxury of a dedicated room. My only option is to double-task our living room for playback. So the first major constraints are space, SPL and the room's shared use. I would certainly enjoy Mahler's 8th Symphony at concert levels but that's not feasible. SPL would be too high, my space doesn't allow proper soundproofing, its size is too small for a realistic representation of such extreme scale. Luckily I'm no loud listener. A big chunk of the mostly acoustic music I prefer doesn't rely on high SPL. My typical listening volume is between 75dB – 85dB in the seat, with occasional peaks in the early 90s. Coming to my room's geometry, the basic dimensions are 5 x 4.5 x 2.7m and its layout forces me to put the speakers 2 – 2.7m apart. The same applies to the listening distance. As for versatility, the room includes a flat-screen TV and there are some décor considerations which favour warm earthy colours and a certain minimalism. Trying to translate these factors into bullet points for my speaker quest unrelated to sound quality, here goes:
For my first foray I wanted to use my Riviera Labs AIC-10. This delivers 10wpc/8Ω of pure class A, nearly 20 watts in class AB. The AIC-10 has been my reference headamp for many years. I find it a very fine balance between technical, fun and emotional aspects. I intend to put it to the test also on loudspeakers before deciding whether to move to a dedicated speaker amp later. This added a significant requirement for my ideal loudspeaker: efficiency well above 90dB combined with benign impedance. In terms of sonic profile, subjectivity is unavoidable. Apart from my preferences already mentioned, one more non-negotiable is lack of listening fatigue. For me this mainly translates to control of HF energy where I'm severely sensitive to treble prominence; and integration of sub bass where I'm allergic to boominess.
