In the first part of this feature, we talked about choosing and buying your equipment. In part 2 we'll discuss getting the equipment to sound the best that you can. This is an area that I feel is often neglected. While large sums of money seem to be spent on hi-fi and accessories, it often seems that not enough time is spent on experimenting with the set-up to get the best out of it. Whilst being a fairly long article it still only addresses some of the possible scenarios and is obviously written from a prospective of an enthusiast offering advice based on their experience and not that of a professional problem solver.
Listening for the first time
When you set up any new equipment for the first time you may find that it disappoints. Some of the reasons for this may be imaginary - expectations may have been built up that are just plain unrealistic. If we spend a bit too much money we often temper the guilt by exaggerating our expectations of how good our acquisitions are. There are also a lot of very real reasons that things may not be working so well, such as set-up, the acoustics of the room, running-in of the equipment and cabling choices.
Running in equipment and warming up
Does running an amplifier for three weeks before listening to it make any difference? Does burning in all of your interconnects and speaker cables make any difference? There is a fair bit of discussion around this topic and I have my own personal views on this, but I'll leave that to you to decide. What is certain is that speakers do get better after they have been run for a good long time. No big surprise really as the speaker cones are dynamic pieces of equipment and will relax a little from being run. So do expect the speakers to just keep getting better. Most equipment also benefits from being at a stable temperature, so warming up is very beneficial too. This is especially true of valve equipment.
The basics of set-up
Isolation
The hi-fi equipment all should be isolated. The aim with the electronics (sources, amps, etc) is to prevent vibrations from getting to the equipment. How important this is depends on the environment and the sensitivity of the equipment. Turntables and valve equipment are obviously particularly sensitive to vibration and generally need to be treated to better isolation that other solid state equipment.
There are a variety of dedicated hi-fi equipment racks on the market. The low price racks offer basic isolation through spiked feet and decoupling of the shelves. The more expensive offer better levels of isolation; some even have floating platforms, which sit on air-filled bladders. The equipment itself normally has feet that have some inbuilt isolation. If you decide that you cannot have a dedicated rack then do try to be sympathetic to the equipment. Place it on firm supports try to isolate it as well as possible (the classic DIY solution is squash balls cut in half as isolation supports). Do try not to stack equipment up on other pieces of equipment - not only is this bad for isolation but it can cause problems with overheating.
My final comment on equipment isolation is that if there aren't any problems then you probably will not notice huge gains from isolating the equipment - in most cases it will be fairly subtle. But if there are problems associated with vibration then you may notice the changes a whole lot more.
Now speaker isolation is a much more serious item. In some cases you can get yourself into real problems. If you have speakers in a room with bare floorboards or a laminated floor you may find yourself exciting the floor, and this can result in uneven bass response. The speakers lower frequencies into the floor and causing it to resonate. If you can feel a lot of vibration in the flooring then you probably need to work on the isolation of the speakers. In these cases you may well find that spikes are inadequate.
While spikes can work extremely well on concrete floors, they are not always ideal when used alone on wooden floors. One answer can be to support the speakers directly down through the floor. Unfortunately, making big holes in the floor can get you in some hot water unless you live on your own. Another alternative is to separate spikes and floor by using a plinth. There are several plinths available commercially but they do cost a fair amount of money, so it can be worth your while making your own DIY versions to test out what works. Concrete paving slabs, hardwood or stone (marble and the like) mounted on top of rubber or fibre-boards can offer solutions that are as good as most commercial offerings.
Positioning equipment
Where you place your equipment is often heavily dictated by the room layout. However, ideally cable runs should be kept as short as reasonably possible (especially the interconnects) and the lengths of speaker cable should be identical. Keeping the speaker cables short and of even length often ends up in the typical hi-fi configuration where the equipment rack sits between the two speakers.
When positioning the equipment do take care of where it sits in relation to you and the speakers. Putting equipment too close to the speakers may result in picking up some undesirable vibration. Also, sitting too close the equipment is generally not desirable. Sources can generate a surprising amount of noise (yes, even CD players). The transformers on some amps can also be a bit noisy too, especially old-fashioned designs of valve amp.
Setting up
There are only really a few set-up points that are really going to make big changes to how the equipment you have is going to sound:
• Speaker positions - the height relative to the listener, the toe-in angle, the distance from back and side walls
• The room interaction; the magnitude of this varies greatly with the speaker design but in almost all cases there will be some interaction
• The cables
All of these are tools that can help you adjust the sound of your system to your own personal taste. Unfortunately, there is not really any formula to follow that guarantees quick success here.
Getting things moving
Before you start any setting up do make sure that all of the connections are correct. Make sure that the speakers' connections are not inverted and that they are both in phase with each other. Very basically do make sure that the left and right connections are correct throughout the system.
The first job is to get a rough idea of where your speakers should go. Site the speakers with the drivers facing dead straight ahead (pointing directly at the opposite wall). Make sure they are an even distance from the back wall, and if the side wall is fairly close then try to make sure that these distances are identical too. You should be aiming to produce a triangular shape with you occupying a point equally spaced between the speakers.
The ratios of these distances is somewhat dictated by the room and you may have to play around with this a bit as you go along. If you received a demo before you bought them, try them in that position first. Of course, if all else fails, the manuals that come with them may have some good suggestions for positioning...
Listening again
Time to start listening. What you will probably find now is that there is a hole in the middle of the sound stage. While it sounds nice and wide, definition in the centre will probably be poor. Vocalists may not seem to occupy a real space and may seem to be off-centre all of the time.
To address this, start to toe in the speakers so that the drivers are starting to face towards the listener. The way in which the speaker disperses the sound from the front baffle varies from design to design and therefore this angle may vary. With some speakers and set-ups, firm imaging doesn't come until the speaker drivers are pointing at or even crossing in front of the listener. You should also start to experiment with the speaker height or your height relative to it.
With conventional speaker layouts (tweeter mounted in the front baffle above the mid range driver/s), it is usually best to have the tweeters more or less level with the ears. Experiment by sitting on cushions or sliding down in the seat. You can then look at modifying your relative height or cheat and tilt the speakers a little. If they are mounted on adjustable spikes this can be done very easily to dial in an angle, which points the tweeters at your ears.
Don't go too silly though - if you can't do it with just a few degrees of tilt look for another solution. Gravity is a wonderful thing but if the centre of gravity in your speakers gets too close or falls outside the base of the speakers then they are going to need repairing before too long.
Do remember that recordings count as well. We are aiming to get all of your recordings sounding good but some recordings are quite simply better than others. You are going to have to be a bit realistic about your expectations. If you read hi-fi magazines you will no doubt have read some descriptions of pieces of music where the author has described sound-stages that pull you into an almost three-dimensional space. There are recordings that genuinely are breathtaking, but the majority aren't. So don't expect to get your socks blown off by everything in your collection.
Next, pay attention to the general tone of your system. Start moving the speakers around a bit, decrease the gap between the speakers and the rear wall. Increase the gap, can you achieve differences? Move the tweeter height relative to you ears. Each time you make a change, give yourself a bit of time testing it so you can fully appreciate the changes.
Bass should be sounding even, warm and rich. Treble should sound even, detailed and engaging. I bet even if you feel that is true, you still feel it can be improved. Hopefully, you won't be feeling that whatever you do, it still doesn't sound right.
If things still don't sound anywhere near right however, then there may be some interaction going on that is messing things up. Your cabling may not be working for you. Remember you should have heard this sounding great in the demonstration room, so you should be able to get it working well at home too. Just occasionally a room is really going to screw things up.
If the room is very sparsely decorated in may be very lively. Remember what rooms are like when they are empty, if there is a hint of this then it could be causing you problems. Very cluttered rooms, which contain lots of soft furnishings can also cause some problems where they over-damp the sound, which can sometimes make it sound thin and lifeless.
Sound is a bit of a funny thing. Different frequencies of sound travel, disperse, reflect and are absorbed in different ways. You really don't need to get too scientific about it to be able to hear the effects. Try some experimenting, if you are suffering from sparse decoration then move in some scatter cushions, a rug or two. Paintings are unbelievable - hanging a few paintings or pictures in strategic places can break the wall up so that the sound waves are disrupted.
If you do have a problem with sparsely decorated rooms it can be very frustrating and you will need to be very patient. The other end of the spectrum with the cluttered room generally doesn't seem to be as severe a problem and the answer is pretty simple - just tidy up and get rid of some stuff. See it as a lifestyle change - you probably didn't need all that stuff anyway…
A word about cables
The role of interconnects and speaker cables in getting the right sound from your system is often undervalued. I have my own very specific views about mains cables and though some swear by them and others swear at them, I'll not be discussing them just yet.
But interconnects and to a slightly lesser degree speaker cables certainly have a profound effect on the sound of your system. In some respects they behave a little like tone controls. So why don't you just have tone controls and not worry about the cables? Well if you assume that the cables are always going to have an effect, whether you like it or not, then if you have tone controls as well you can be putting rather a lot of filtration in the path of the signal. You could even find them working in opposition to each other.
Okay so cables are great, but what's not so great is that they are a bit of a lottery. Try before you buy is not always an option and even if it is, it's not always straight forward to pick ones that work well. If you assume that each cable has a character of its own (and that reasonably could be true) then there are a lot of potential combinations. The reason cables have an effect is the relationship between each of their electrical characteristics - the relative inductance, resistance and capacitance, and these properties are a result of the construction of the cable and the materials used.
There are the very high-end cables that promise everything and are highly regarded in the hi-fi press but are they really as good as they say? Well, more expensive material sets are used, and they may have even been manufactured specifically as hi-fi cable, which not all cables can claim. You would also like to think that they have spent more time in development too. But this doesn't necessarily make them them right for you system. I guess what I am saying is just buying expensive cables doesn't mean that they will work well in your system. If you have bought equipment from a hi-fi shop then you may now be counting you blessings. They may be able to make suggestions on cables that may help you to dial in the sound and hopefully they will even allow you to borrow some to test before buying.
All of these changes that you can make often interact with each other so do remember that you may need to change the speaker positions slightly to take advantage of the full benefits that a cable may make. Moving stuff around in a room may also make changes to the way things sound. So do mess around a bit - it takes a little while but it is always worth it.
I hope that this article encourages you to try to get the best out of your equipment. Do try and have fun messing around with your equipment, and don't make it too much of a chore. Make changes a bit at a time and most problems can be fixed in the end, though it can sometime just take a bit of time.
Be inventive in the way that you go about testing these things, don't go rushing out spending a lot of money on accessories to cure a problem you don't have. There are lots of hints about, in magazines on the web etc. Some of these, like the squash balls for isolation, are real gems (why shouldn't they work as well as anything else - even if they don't, you have only spent a couple of pounds) others, well they may not so good. Above all, enjoy the music, after all that is what hi-fi is supposed to be all about at the end of the day.
Read Part 1 of this feature.
