Compensating for these inherent mechanical errors as well as the tolerancing of components in the crossover and the limitations in your measured placement, this can only be done by ear.
RG. Which is more important, system set-up or speaker set-up?
ST. System set-up: if the system isn’t set-up properly, it’s almost impossible to get the best out of any speaker set-up process. For example, if someone has a very mediocre standard of system infrastructure and set-up, if you correct those short-comings they are going to hear those benefits really clearly, because the speakers are just reflecting the amount of noise and the degree of organisation in the signal they’re receiving. Reverse that situation: if the signal is carrying a lot of noise, nothing that I do with the speakers can eliminate it. Feed your speakers a compromised signal and they’ll never deliver what they’re capable of. So, system set-up is definitely the first (and the easiest) step.
It’s one of the reasons that retro or traditional products often prove popular, especially if they come after a really high-tech and high-resolution system. They succeed by masking or covering over a multitude of discontinuities and musical sins. You get flow – you just don’t get any real depth of musical or technical insight. They might tell you what’s being played: they seldom tell you how it’s being played.
I always aim to have the system reassembled and powered up by the end of day one. That allows it to run overnight before I start on the speaker set-up. But it also allows the client to hear the impact of what I’ve already done. Even stone cold, the difference is normally already enormous.
RG. How much of your process as a whole is dependent entirely on your experience and ears and how much could somebody undertake themselves?
ST. Well, anybody with the tools, the time and the patience could certainly do the whole of the first day – the dismantling, cleaning and reassembling of the system. It’s essentially a case of taking something apart, cleaning it and putting it back together, with considerable care and attention to detail. You need to understand what makes a difference and it helps, but isn’t essential, to understand why. None of this stuff is difficult – certainly not in terms of knowledge or technique. You just need to know that it needs doing. I’m sure there are more things that could factor in and those would be good to know also, but I, we, other people in the industry are learning all the time.
It’s also about learning your products and how to get the best out of them: The opportunities your equipment offers. For example, take the RevOpod isolation feet. The RevOpods offer height adjustment in incredibly fine increments. You can use that for levelling. You can use that for optimizing the load on each foot. But the height of the foot also affects the resonant frequency of the system, the frequency at which energy leaving the chassis gets fed to the substrate. So, you can tune the RevOpod to each individual chassis and load. Yes, you need to get your equipment level and you need to make sure that the feet are equally loaded, but you can extract even more performance by playing with the height of the feet. Each case will be different, defined by the component mass and the substrate that’s supporting it. Ripping the system down and then rebuilding it from scratch is the perfect opportunity to explore every aspect of your equipment and ancillaries.
