I am both thrilled and embarrassed to make this post. I am thrilled because I finally after all of 60+ years as an audiophile, I realized that I never paid sufficient attention to my listening chair, except for its location for which I regularly use a laser measuring device to insuire equidistance to both spealers for optimum souind staging and phasing.. I also try to do my best listening with my glassess off and never a hat; but somehow I overlooked that my listening chair is a heavily stuffed leather Natuzzi arm chair that the way I sit has a back above my ears. I know the dangers of this causing unwanted reflections in my near field. I even knew to move my equally over stuiffed matching leather ottoman which clearly impacted my bass my response.
But, some how I overlookeed that I was sitting in a very damped position in my chair after spending gobs of money to insure clarity with my electronics. cabling and speakers, only to screw it up within inches of my ears. Steve's getting a new listening chair with a lower back height started my thinking in this area.
Well today my selected new listening chair arrived after weeks of obsessing and fighting the battle betwenn my head and my gut about how much is it okay to spend on a chair now that I am retired. Most of what I liked cost at least $3,500 and up to $6,500. and somehow that was too much, actually next to nothing compared to what I have paid for my bucket list system. I have no cables that cost less than this amount and many that cost up to 4x per meter.
Well while I am resorceful at finding reduced pricing on most of what I buy, I really won on the chair front. I had decided I wanted an Ekornes Stressless chair, after going to a dealer and sitting in one for about 20 minuite. The question is which one, because they have an incredible number of models that are variants of their core design, and each comes in small, medium and large, which impacts the size of the overall chair, (damping influence) as well as the height of the back of the chair (reflected waves).
There are lots of used Ekornes chairs on Ebay and elsewhere, so the price dropped to the $2,500-$3,500 point, but many have been well loved and used because it is so comfortable (that I will probably listen to even more music now), but most showed signs of wear that somehow offended me. Also most of these chairs are heavily stuff and in fact overstuffed versions for audio. So I found on Ebay an Ekornes Mayfair Small that was in good shape and from what I could determine, was succiently narrow to reduce the global damping factor and the back was atleast two inches below my ears when most erect and even better with a small bit of recline.
So I made a lowball offer and paid $1,100.00 plus $200 for shipping, which makes it the cheapest piece of my system by a big margin, and it arrived today. The chair is beaturiful and comfortable as expected, but the impact on the overall room sound, changed dramaticallty because there is so much less damping in my acoustic nearfield. It is too soon for my final assessment. But I can already tell you somethings that I really like. It feels like I am listening on a pedestal with much less floor interactions and the components of each sound are individually more articluate, AND I am listening at slightly lower levels because it sounds more pure.
I am guessing that I will fall asleep in this find tonight!!!