Firstly, I’d like to thank Steve and Cathy for the gracious hospitality they extended to Joy and me. They are great people. I also wanted to say that I am not at all good at forum posting. I really never do it, so please excuse my poor writing skills.
Secondly, I wanted to fully concur with Steve when he said the sound was $hit when we first turned it on. The sound was absolutely hideous. I’ve wondered why this happens. I think this occurs because, when music plays, the listening room becomes an intense energy field in which everything is vibrating. Vibrating components reach an equilibrium point with the vibrating shelves and furniture they’re resting upon. This creates an electro-mechanical feedback loop. So, when we changed Steve’s racks from what they were to what they are, all of the equilibrium points started changing and as the CMS filters (shelves) were changing the equilibrium points, the speakers were changing the energy field until a new equilibrium point (a new electro-mechanical feedback loop) was established………..makes my hair hurt. It's kind of like "mechanical imprinting" (as far as I know, I just made up that term) where the component drags the last equilibrium point along with it for a bit and that equilibrium point gets expressed in some new way when placed on a new resting area. Anyway, that's my guess.
Thirdly, we are trying to accomplish a specific objective with our racks and filter systems. I think that we can all agree that there have been many great advances in all types of components. But, what bothered me was that the dialogue, the language, we were using to describe advancements through their sonic differences, was not changing. Advancements occurred but the conversation stayed the same. Why? To my thinking, this was because, the wall between the listener and the musicians, that can be defined to exist at the front edge of the loudspeakers, remained.
What I want as a listener is to be a part of the recorded acoustic. I want to experience the emotion and context of music in the most personal way. So, we tried to find a way to lower the noise floor to such a vanishing level (without messing with frequency response) that the division between the listener and the musicians at the loudspeakers fell away. Granted, there are a million things that go into making a great sound system and we are just a part of it, but racks and shelves generally limit the performance of components and when you start perfecting your foundation, you start thinking about what is possible in new ways. It was really gratifying to read that Steve was able to make a further step into his soundstage; to become more a part of it. I know this can't and won't happen on all recordings, but it should happen on many. This, I think is the new objective; the new language and the new way to describe the performance of a system; the degree to which the system removes “The Wall” and allows the listener to enter the musical event as it occurred, or was engineered to be heard.
I hope this makes sense. And, please do not read anything I have written to be critical of any manufacturer in any area of our great hobby. I come in peace.......we're just trying to make things better.
