Come the evening the assembled throng listened to the system, loved the new tonearm and several people commented how good the system was sounding. “Oh, that’s because Roy installed some Odin interconnects. I couldn’t believe the difference they made!” says HW – before going on to say (without even pausing for breath) “He’s got speaker cables too – but he won’t let us hear them…” You can see how this goes. Threatened by a mob of ravening audiophiles I had little choice but to install the ridiculously long O2 speaker cables, heaping the surplus behind the Blades. And everybody loved the extra bass weight and extension, power and dynamics – except me. I felt the music lost its sense of coherence and flow, intimacy and emotional connection – something I was easily able to demonstrate by swapping back to the V2.
An inconvenient truth…
“Does that mean the V2 is better than the (far more expensive) O2?” I was asked. My response was to swap back to the O2 – but to slide the slab-mounted speakers forward about 15mm. Now the system retained and built on its intimacy and emotional communication, adding substance, dimensionality and presence to the performance and lifting its expressive quality significantly. “What did you just do?” I was asked, so I explained what I’d done and why. After a prolonged silence, one of the reviewers in the audience (there were several) spoke up. “Does that mean you shift the position of the speakers every time you alter something in the system?” To which I replied, “Yes. I look at speaker positioning every time I make a change. Sometimes it needs a big adjustment, sometimes a small one, very occasionally, no adjustment at all.” He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “You realise that pretty much invalidates every review I’ve written in the last 30-years?”
Yup. Like I said: inconvenient.
Given just how demonstrable this is, you might well wonder why magazines and reviewers, retailers and many listeners continue in a state of denial. How often have you attended a store demonstration in which the salesman has adjusted speaker position to accommodate the different products you are listening to? Because as the example above shows, it ain’t just changing power amps that demands a shift in speaker placement. You change anything that impacts the system’s spectral balance, and you will disturb the speaker/room relationship. So why is the industry so wilfully blind to this issue? It’s a story that stretches back decades and an assumption that is so embedded in both audio activity and the articles of faith that surround it that it’s simply easier to carry on and ignore the facts.
If you look at the emergence of observational reviewing, especially as practiced by Harry Pearson and TAS, it quickly fastened on the ‘change just one thing’ approach to comparative listening. Although even then the approach was flawed, the understanding of system set up and interactions was still emerging, while the limited number of different products vying for attention simplified things considerably. At the same time, the idea of the Reference System was set in stone. It started out as, ‘this is the best system you can possibly get’ but as more reviewers joined the magazines, that idea quickly got debased, until it started to mean, ‘this is my basis for comparison’. Pretty soon, reviews became all about audible difference (something that it’s easy to detect and describe) as opposed to overall performance and musical integrity – which is a considerably more challenging topic.
Stranger than fact-ion…
Believe it or not, originally it was retailers who led opinion and more often than not, magazines took their lead from what was being bigged up by the stores. But as retailers became more and more dependent on reviews so they mimicked the review process. But in this instance there was an added benefit. It’s an old adage that retailers sell the products they like (or want to get rid of)… By setting a system up around the favoured ‘winner’, you are severely handicapping the competition. It doesn’t matter whether you are demoing CD player, cables or amplifiers, the one with which the system was set up is always going to sound the best.
