I have experienced enough system set-ups by Stirling and others, at shows, in client rooms and at home, to know that you aren’t going to simply stumble into the best sound. Everything makes a difference. Speaker placement demands adjustment according to the associated equipment, and adjustments too small to be measured can make really significant musical differences. One nudge of a speaker, one cable out of place, a change in humidity or temperature that throws off a rack’s level—these are all common culprits that undermine musical performance, things that have forced me to my hands and knees, searching for the gremlin that slipped into my system.
Perhaps the real lesson here is to know what you don’t know. Somebody who is better at set up than you are is going to extract better and more performance from your system – the very same system – than you can. I’m lucky in that Stirling is local and prepared to tolerate my unreasonable demands on his time. Even the best, most practiced and most experienced of us still benefit from a second set of ears and a different perspective. One way or another, we all need a Stirling…
And finally…
I knew exactly where I was going to start, once the system had been adjusted, settled in and warmed up. Before 2020, I doubt that I had listened to Beethoven’s First Symphony more than a dozen times in my life. Then AliaVox released a complete Beethoven cycle in two sets, on hybrid SACD and featuring the unlikely line-up of the Concert Des Nations conducted by early music maven, Jordi Savall. Since those sets arrived, I must have listened to Savall’s Beethoven First Symphony dozens of times, so into the Neodio’s transport it went. My jaw dropped as I experienced a musical presence and substance, an almost ‘wall of sound’ utterly different to previous experience with that silver disc.
Like Phil Spector’s wall of sound, the soundstage was dense, with every cubic millimeter filled with energy and texture. Unlike Spector’s wall of sound this CH equipment produced a wall that was not only wide but deep, layered and three dimensional. It perfectly captured the small orchestra, closely packed into the tiny space in which the recording was deliberately made.
I recall previously listening to the disc, comparing the CD layer (played on the Neodio Origine) with the SACD layer (played through the CH Precision D1.5 SACD/CD Player) through my ARC/Yvette system. That comparison impressed on me just how superior the SACD layer sounded. This time around I might not have had the D1.5 on hand for comparison, yet the CD layer sounded better than I had ever heard it before, and not by a small margin. Not only did the sound-staging and instrumental separation improve, but the tonality of (especially) the opening bars was far more accurate. The Origine’s musical coherence combined with the astonishing dynamic resolution and range of the L1/X1/M1.1 combination brought Jordi Savall springing back to life, with a huge soundstage, transparency, and naturalness to spare. “Who needs an SACD player?” was the first thought that occurred to me while listening to that Beethoven disc.
