Finally, there’s the whole issue of establishing a stable working environment for the system. Consider the Wadax/CH/Göbel set-up: it’s about as complex as you can get, certainly in terms of sheer box-count. Hence the almost obsessive attention to the details of support and levelling, consistent cabling (even down to every AC cable feeding a component being the same type and length), system grounding and contact cleanliness. As systems get more complex and involve more boxes doing more, different jobs, achieving any kind of infrastructural consistency becomes a huge challenge.
In one sense, at least for those of us who have invested in big systems, this is actually good news. Understanding the structural problems that have been introduced by the market and the media’s focus on individual product differences rather than system performance offers a systematic and cost-effective route to significantly improving the performance of the systems we already own. You can introduce consistency and simplicity to even the most complex systems. We have the time, the commitment, the opportunity and, as long as we pull our heads out of the sand, we can have the will to make our systems sound considerably better, both through execution and through a more enlightened approach to future purchases. Bully for us…
From the industry’s point of view, things ain’t so rosy. From the perspective of whether (or not) high quality home audio remains relevant or even available, the choices are stark. We need to start delivering on the promise at price points people can actually afford. We need to start offering starter systems that actually deliver in terms of performance rather than feature count. We need to start acknowledging the issues that surround digital replay and streaming in particular. We need to start taking entry level vinyl replay seriously again – if not as a system solution, certainly as a benchmark for acceptable performance. Most of all, we need to stop with the Cool Aid and take a long, hard listen to the musical capabilities of the various formats, particularly streaming.
I can see retailers throwing up their hands in horror. Tell customers they can’t have streaming, or that streaming isn’t good enough? Suicide! No, it isn’t. Suicide is telling everybody that the future’s rosy and streaming is fantastic when it so clearly suffers from significant issues. It’s not about dissing streaming. It’s all about delivering streaming solutions that actually work – and that’s only going to happen once we accept that streaming (and locally stored file replay) has real issues that need to be solved. Compare a cheap streamer to a cheap record player and you’ll start to understand the problem.
Likewise, given the practical advantages of integrated digital/amplification solutions, with the reduction in box count and potential for endless, questionable facilities, it’s no surprise to find so many of them pushed forward as the saviors of starter systems. In fact, “What – no DAC?” directed at an amplifier is today’s equivalent of people asking, “What – no metal dome tweeter?” in the ‘80s. Just ’cos everybody’s doing it, that doesn’t make it a good idea. Given the vulnerability of digital replay to external influence, it’s hardly surprising that so few of them actually work, at least on a musical level. Instead, most of them introduce a fundamental and irrevocable flaw, right at the start of the chain: a flaw that is simply amplified by everything that follows. Hanging an integrated streamer/amp on the end of a domestic network, is a bit like sitting a record player on the floor, right in front of a 12” woofer. You are compromising performance before you even begin.
