It's the NearField League. Whilst featured in these pages before, there's far too little general noise on it. A refresher is in order particularly after a recent podcast when John Darko asked about my hifi hierarchy. This spun into "I wish I'd known when I started all this…" comments. Here's one I only assimilated many years after first chasing all the usual. What was that insight? Fuggeddabaud the big leagues of free-field speaker systems. Lose your sonic greenhorns in our NFL with a setup like recording professionals use daily with monitors atop a console. In fact, turn around the usual orientation of speakers against the wall, seat in the middle of the room – like so:
Cat optional.
Sit against the wall, place speakers within 1½m or less toed in face on. Hello tidy listening zone instead of imposing your hifi upon an entire room. The backs of these speakers see far more empty space than they would in a classic layout. This nicely minimizes room interference since sound loses output with distance and we just made our 'front wall' reflections travel farther. By sitting close with the speakers sharply angled in, sidewall interactions diminish and our SPL needs reduce. We hear more low-level detail without needing to crank it to compensate for reverberant opacity. If set up smartly, we simulate out-of-skull headphone directness with greater immersion than 'faraway' setups generate. In this upstairs system, a single high-current power cord plugged into a wall socket behind my sofa runs concealed beneath that small striped throw rug. It emerges at its far long edge, then runs beneath the lowboy's lower shelf to a 4-outlet Furutech AC distributor. The three components on the table face me, their backsides and connecting cables hide behind a small low two-panel screen. It's a tidy solution that images heroically yet puts my head inside a large sonic bubble rather than project the sonic scenery at a distance. Such a nearfield position obviously wants smaller speakers with closely spaced drivers to cohere correctly. A side benefit of monitors is lower cost and looking less intrusive. Of course a desktop too plays our NFL but unless we work in a home office, few want to spend their after-work hours with tunes on a desktop. They would prefer a nearfield system in a living room, den or even bedroom that involves a couch or cosy chair; and no work computer. I only get away with a serious office system because my work revolves around listening. Civilians will want to consume their tunes differently.
Here comes the same upstairs zone rejigged with different hardware. Whilst these sound|kaos Vox3 may look unusually tall, their custom Cherry uprights are precisely tailored for me sitting in half lotus on two pillows on the sofa. That places my ramrod ears rather higher than slouchy normal. It wants these small widebanders taller too to aim at my ears not chest. Because these benefit from some 1st-octave assist unlike the earlier Virtual Hifi Cobra radicals with their six passive radiators per side, a compact Dynaudio sub does the honours. Despite not looking 'normal', this in fact is a serious and seriously performing little rig—if I may say so myself.
To document that having the far side of a system face the room needn't look ass-backwards, here's a few views. I happen to think that quite a number of people who never considered such a layout before could implement it successfully and thereby reap the benefits of achieving more with less: less physical intrusion, less room reactivity, less SPL fatigue, less hardware investiture; more linear detailed sound, more immersion, more intimacy. Feel free to disagree but I call this a win/win². "Of course you would" you counter grumbly. "It's your room." True. But I could easily have set it up the normal way. I chose not to. In this multi-purpose room, I didn't want the entire layout worshipping at the hifi altar. Now I have a zone on a small throw rug that sounds far bigger, more linear and involving than you'd think if still subscribed to the mid/farfield motto as the ideal stereo solution.
