Some people might be able to lift a solid chunk this heavy into place on my amp-stand. I’m not one them. I waited for a “volunteer” to help position the amplifier. The much more manageable L1 and X1 were easy enough to slip into place without any added muscle. I let everything bed in and cook for a week before detailed set up. And when I say, detailed, I mean more detailed than I am capable of handling on my own. I’m fortunate that Stirling Trayle, of Audio Systems Optimized, lives nearby and can be bribed with good food and better wine to take care of all the heavy mental lifting. He has vast experience with system set-up in general, with CH Precision equipment in particular and with working on my system. I know – I’m shameless in pursuit of better sound! Before he arrived, I at least did the easy work, cleaning all the contacts including IEC spades, which need the most frequent and time-consuming attention. I removed and cleaned all the cabling. I re-leveled the racks, checked, and adjusted torque on speaker bolts, and double-checked the settings on both tonearms. That is when the hard work began.
Compared to the tube-based equipment I have grown used to, CH Precision’s software controlled electronics are highly configurable and adjustable, requiring not only the mental dexterity to navigate layers of drop-down menus, but also the knowledge to understand the musical implications of the choices you are making. The most important of these include adjusting the gain structure between the line-stage and amplifier and setting the amplifier’s negative feedback level. Which is where Stirling’s vast experience was invaluable. We decided on zero negative feedback as the ideal, although the M1.1 allows choices in steps, all the way from 0% to 100%.
The bigger picture…
Previously, Stirling had dialed in the speaker placement for the ARC/Alexia combination. The lion’s share of the re-set involved shifting the speakers to accommodate the totally different low-frequency and spectral characteristics of the CH electronics. That meant playing with position, height, attitude and toe-in – each in increasingly microscopic steps until he was working with adjustments so small that they defeat conventional measurement.
Some may find the idea of adjusting the speakers on an amplifier-by-amplifier basis novel if not downright insane. Doesn’t moving the speakers invalidate direct comparison between the two amps? In one, limited sense, it does. But I’m interested in my system sounding the best it can: the best it can with the ARC amps; the best it can with the CH amps. That’s the basis for serious comparison – and that definitely, absolutely means re-setting the speaker position.
In this new YouTube world, most people (who think about audio equipment at all) think that speaker placement is simply a matter of finding the best room orientation and then placing the speakers according to certain formulae, based on speaker width, listening distance and ear height. Some use acoustic programs to calculate ideal placement – although how those positions are translated into the real world escapes me. Wilson famously apply (and teach their dealers) their own WASP approach, which is more developed than most. But even this really only gets you to an initial position. There’s a long way you can go and a lot of performance to be unlocked if you take things further.
