Standmounted/Bookshelf Loudspeakers

My relatively small room measures around 19' by 16.5', with a 9' 3" ceiling broken up by 9" vigas—raw pine logs. The room is carpeted, and there are patches of Sonex foam on the ceiling to damp primary reflections of the sound. The other wall has RPG Abffusors behind the listening seat to absorb and diffuse what would otherwise be early rear-wall reflections of the sound that might blur the stereo imaging precision. ASC Tube Traps are used in the room corners to even out the room's bass resonances, the result being a relatively uniform reverberation time of around 200ms from the upper bass to the middle treble, falling to 150ms above 10kHz.

The loudspeakers were positioned for the best sound (with only one pair of loudspeakers in the listening room at a time), generally some 3' from the rear wall (which is faced with books and LPs) and approximately 5' from the side walls (which also have bookshelves covering some of their surfaces). The Boston Acoustics speakers sat on their own LST stands, these filled with a mixture of lead shot and sand and spiked to the concrete floor beneath the rug/pad.

Amplifiers used were a solid-state, dual-mono Mark Levinson No.333, a tubed Mesa Engineering Baron, and a tubed Cary Audio Design CAD-300SEI integrated. The preamplifier was the remote-controlled Mark Levinson No.38S, with either a Mod Squad Phono Drive EPS or an Audio Alchemy VAC-in-the-Box used to amplify LP signals from a Linn Sondek/Cirkus/Trampolin/Lingo/Ekos/Arkiv setup on an ArchiDee table.

Digital sources were Mark Levinson No.30.5 HDCD and Parts Connection Assemblage D/A processors driven by a Mark Levinson No.31 transport via Madrigal and Illuminati AES/EBU cables and Meridian 518 or Genesis Digital Lens jitter-reduction units (No.31) or Sonic Frontiers UltraJitterbug (Assemblage). I also used the impressive Sonic Frontiers SFCD-1 CD player. Laserdiscs were played on a Panasonic Prism LX-1000, the digital signal taken from its TosLink output.

Interconnects used were AudioQuest's AudioTruth Lapis X3 alternating with XLO 1.1 Signature; speaker cable was a bi-wired set of Cardas Cross. All source components and preamps used in my listening room were plugged-in to a Power Wedge 116 Mk.II, itself plugged-in to a dedicated AC circuit and fitted with the Power Enhancer option. The amplifiers were plugged-in to a Power Wedge 110, again fitted with the Power Enhancer.

The speakers were broken-in before audition by being placed face-to-face and driven with out-of-phase, high-level pink noise for 36 hours, followed by the Burn-in Noise track on Stereophile's Test CD 3 for another 12 hours.—John Atkinson