Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so why not? With three cones placed between the player and the shelf we settled down to listen again and make some close comparisons. The change was as startling as before: More dynamic, greater separation, increased presence and more shape to notes. This was not a small difference! But… But… There’s always a but. It’s rare indeed that any change in cabling or system support is wholly positive. There’s always a trade-off or at least a negative tendency. That negative might well be a reduction in something undesirable, resulting in a net positive – but the point here is that it will always be a balancing act. Listen to the D1.5 sat on those three cones and it was easy to be impressed – indeed, super impressed – by the positives. But once we removed the cones it also started to reveal their negatives – at least to my ears. The positives were indeed huge, but they came at the price of a degree of structural and rhythmic coherence. I could hear the pieces of the music more clearly, but they no longer linked together to create such a coherent whole.
THAT’s what started the debate. How could I not hear and appreciate the benefits? Clearly, I was looking for something completely different from the system! Clearly I was heading for a different place (audio Hell presumably)! Clearly, the cones just let you hear more clearly! Remember, this was AFTER dinner and I was the designated driver, so Larry was maybe a shade more enthusiastic than normal. But he was certainly nothing if not committed to his position. So naturally, I was duty bound to respond equally seriously. There followed a long period of comparative listening, of shifting and flipping cones, working with position and different combinations of point-up and point-down placement. Refining the set up could minimise what I considered to be the negatives, but I couldn’t eliminate them altogether. Ultimately I still preferred the sound of the player au naturelle.
By which time it was around 2:00am and time for grumpy audiophiles to agree to disagree, turn their back on their entrenched positions and shamble off to bed.
“Alice… Oh Alice…”
At this point – and after several hours of concentrated effort – I could have reached several conclusions. The simplest might have been that, whilst AcouPlex works brilliantly as a shelf (and it definitely does) it’s less successful as a cone. Indeed, as spectacular as the cones were in terms of definition, shape and presence, there was a definite sense of musical dislocation when they were in place. Case closed. I could have added a number of riders or qualifiers, along the this system, this player, this situation line, but the conclusion appeared fairly obvious: the AcouPlex cones were introducing a ripple or fault in the musical and rhythmic continuity of the recording. Equally obvious was that Larry didn’t hear that issue, didn’t recognise the problem and disagreed completely with my observations.
Such disagreements are not unusual. Such anomalous results (shelf good, cone not so good) are also commonplace. It’s easy to get too much of a good thing. It’s also easy to get complacent about the positives to the point where it’s easy to dismiss or shift the blame for the negatives – especially when the positives are so smack you in the face obvious. We’ve all done it and sooner or later we’ve all been bitten. Even so, it wasn’t until I woke up the next morning that I realized just where (and how early) this whole process had left the rails.
