The good news is that, slowly but surely, the industry is at least beginning to recognise the benefits of better set up. What I am finding is that, working beside dealers rather than in competition with them, more and more are realising the value of what I offer and are increasingly willing to learn, from me and from the experience. More and more manufacturers are employing me to set up their products for review. You might frown at that, but actually, it makes a whole lot of sense. Not only is the value of any review questionable unless the reviewer has heard the product at its best, but the reviewer’s system gets a makeover too, which makes subsequent reviews more reliable too.
RG. Paying $5,000 for some stranger to come and set-up your system probably seems like a stretch for most people. Have you ever had dissatisfied customers?
ST. Not that I know of. I had one client who actually asked me to come back, because after I’d left, he realised that what he’d described to me, what he was asking for, wasn’t actually what he wanted. He was following ‘audiophile wisdom’ rather than trusting his own ears and musical tastes. Once he realised that, his solution was to bring me back, to give him what he did want. Which I guess demonstrates a couple of things: that it’s possible to bend a system and set-up to a client’s wishes, but that you should be careful what you wish for… Every system is a compromise and so is every set-up. A big part of what I do is matching those compromises to the client’s musical expectations. This also taught me just how important it is to tease out what a client is actually seeking, from their system and from music. I need to get past the ‘audio speak’ because, the whole point of what I’m trying to do is take the system past the limitations, past that that descriptive frame of reference. I don’t want to hear about this piece of equipment or what they think that piece brings to the system.
But there’s a second level to this, a parallel process if you like: un-learning how we’ve come to listen. Partly as a result of the way equipment is viewed and reviewed, partly as a result of failings in the overall coherence and performance of systems as a whole, we have developed a detail orientated rather than holistic way of listening to systems and describing not just their sound but changes in that sound. “I can hear the shimmer of that cymbal much more clearly!”, rather than, “Ahh… now I know why that cymbal’s there.” The first observation is pretty academic. It’s the second point that really matters. Rather than obsessing over individual performance aspects or sonic attributes, it’s a case of learning what a system can actually do in terms of recreating the sense of a musical event, that sense of performance.
I had a client recently that I revisited, because he’d bought a new component. When I got there, he said, “I’ve got something interesting to tell you. When you left after the first visit, I got quite confused. I didn’t recognise the system. It took me ten-days to understand what it was doing. I had to un-learn the way I was listening and what I was listening for. I had to stop listening to the system and start listening to the music.” There’s a very real difference between listening to the system or listening to the sound and listening to music. Everybody gets it, but while some people get it instantly, others take a while.
