It’s the combination of these tools and the experience and techniques that have evolved around them that make Stirling’s process so effective. The ability to make minute, repeatable and reversible adjustments to speaker position, combined with the experience and ability to ‘learn’ a speaker and room make his abilities unique. You might think that, with years of experience behind you, tweaking and fiddling with hi-fi systems, you know how to set up your speakers and get the best out of your equipment. Well, consider this. I’ve spent a lot more time than you, working almost every day with a far wider range of equipment than you have. But even that degree of accumulated experience doesn’t equip me to compete with Stirling when it comes to speaker set up. It’s what he does – all day, every day – and he’s better at it than anybody else I know. Considerably better. Like I said – you might think you’re good at speaker set-up; you might think that you’re as good as Stirling and that he has nothing to offer in your system; you’d be wrong about that. In fact, the better you think you are, the more you probably have to (un)learn. Right about now, you might be thinking that you are the exception to that rule: you’re not. As Stirling will readily admit, the more you know, the more you can learn.
In a review context, that realisation matters because it means getting to hear what a speaker and a system can really do. As a customer it matters because it means that you’ll (finally) get the performance you’ve been paying for, for all those years. But in the context of this product and this review, it’s particularly important because Göbel take it seriously enough to want to include specialized set-up in the price of the speaker. They are hoping to have Stirling install all Monarques or Majestics sold in the US, where he is based, with alternative arrangements for the rest of the world. That’s under discussion, but it is a welcome indication that the company acknowledges the importance of set-up and of actually delivering the performance their customers have paid for. With products at this level, set-up is a specialist skill – one that eludes most dealers, distributors and manufacturers. Designing, building or selling a product is a very different proposition from getting the best out of it, something the industry as a whole has been remarkably slow to acknowledge. Göbel’s initiative is as welcome as it is overdue.
You might think that, with all of the preliminary work carried out in the first stage of set-up – and with the speakers now optimally placed – it would be a case of job done, but far from it. Questions of chassis grounding, mechanical damping, noise reduction and placement/cable dressing still remained to be resolved. Although this was a long-winded process, involving multiple stages of comparative listening, I’ll simply list the results rather than itemizing the steps along the way.
We used the Telos Grounding Master to provide chassis grounding for the source components and line-stage. These were connected using Nordost’s QKore grounding wires. We experimented with the CAD GCR for grounding the chassis on the remotely located power amps, but settled in the end on the Telos GNR – now replaced by the Foundation Ground Core.
