What you’ve also learnt is that the proposition, so loudly promoted by certain speaker manufacturers, that theirs is one and only one correct position for their speaker in a given room is little more than self-serving BS. Change the amplifier and you will inevitably alter the amount and distribution of bass energy that the speaker outputs – and that will mandate a shift in position to rebalance that different output against the room characteristics.
Let’s consider a real-world example. Consider for a second a system that has been set up around an original Krell power amp, with its lean and tight bottom end. Simply substitute an Audio Research tube design and the bottom end is going to lose any vestige of shape, pace or timing, definition or texture – not because the amp lacks any of those attributes but because the speaker/room relationship, used to the cage-fighter proportions of the Krell’s bottom end are going to go all sumo on you with the ARC’s more generous and rounded low-frequencies. Does that make the ARC a way worse amp than the Krell? If you are going to leave the speaker set up as is, then in a very real sense, the answer is yes. But readjust the speaker/room relationship (the positioning of the speakers) and you can restore the sense of musical proportion. Will the ARC bass ever be as drum tight as the Krell’s? Unlikely – but brought back into balance, it will allow the tube amp’s other musical attributes to emerge and flourish, restoring the qualitative performance balance in no uncertain terms. I know this because, back in the day, I went through just this exercise. Although it actually resulted in me buying a third, different amplifier – largely because the D70 didn’t cut it and the D115 was out of my budget – it was a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
Of course, the Krell/ARC comparison is a case of chalk and cheese, the results predictably stark. But the differences in ultimate performance between ostensibly more similar designs can be just as damaging, although rather more insidious. You might assume that substituting one high-powered solid-state design for another would require little or no shift in speaker position – but the use of silicon and a similar rated power output tells you little about actual power delivery, load tolerance, character or the resulting spectral balance once you hook the amp up to the speakers. And spectral balance is the killer here. On the one hand I’m telling you to consider overall musical performance: on the other I’m talking about the mechanics of bass reproduction. That’s because the quality and quantity of bass has a profound affect on the musical presentation and expressive range of the system as a whole. Overly lean, too little weight and the sound becomes gutless, lacking presence and energy, shape and dimensionality: Too much and the music becomes sluggish and bloated, slow and clumsy, devoid of transparency, impact and temporal flexibility. Balanced performance – the point at which you maximise the bottom end weight and impact without slowing proceedings or clogging up the mid-band – rests on a positional knife-edge defined in terms of millimetres and fractions of a degree. Start altering the relationship between the amp and speaker, shift the nature and quantity of the bass output and the performance quickly collapses in on itself, lacking the presence and communicative capabilities that are the hallmarks of a really good system. And it’s not just the bass. The nature of sound/music means that once the bass is out of whack, it drags the rest of the range with it.
The value of experience…
But you don’t need to take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Put a different amplifier in your system and then see/hear what happens once you start to adjust speaker position. The reality of the situation is as demonstrable as it is obvious as it is inconvenient. A few years ago, I was flying back from RMAF and dropped in to see VPI. My visit coincided with an evening event for the New Jersey Audiophile Society at the VPI house so, in the afternoon Harry Weisfeld and I went to install a new, prototype arm and check over the system. As well as the VPI ‘table, the system consisted of Simaudio Moon electronics and KEF Blade speakers, wired up with Nordost Valhalla 2 cable. While tweaking the set up I mentioned to Harry that I had a set of Odin 2 interconnects and speaker cables in my luggage, cables I’d been using for a presentation at the show and he asked to hear them. I duly substituted the O2 interconnects and HW was duly impressed. I drew the line at the speaker cables because the system was running 1.5m speaker leads and the O2 cables I was carrying were 6.5m long.
