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Hi Michael - Your review of the Puritan Conditioner concurs with other CZcams reviews. I'm in the process of having a dedicated 20 amp circuit installed in my listening room. Are you using the Puritan PSM156 on a dedicated circuit?

The RME should sound better than the Naim...as a DAC. Good review.

I tried it, I like it. 85% rule sounds good with both the Unifi Reference and SVS Ultra (bookshelf). Probably the best I've ever heard them sound. Thanks for the post!

Fyne Audio is the old Tannoy we all used to know and love, stick with them.......the Tannoy Brand is just that, its just a Brand now, never has such a great company been ruined by soo few! Tannoy are still in Scotland, Hamilton I believe. More of an assembly plant/logistics I think.

They dont care because they were bought by chinese interests

You mentioned Gigafoil Ethernet filter and Sotm Ethernet cables during your first video on the subject then never mentioned again….. a guess you weren’t pleased ?

Born: 1926

When i listen to my music im usually always cleaning my place so im walking all over and bending over etc etc and my place isnt huge so i dont have many options for speaker placement so Im not so anal about these things. I made sure to have a good mix of different size speakers and basically made speaker walls on both sides of my TV. 2 nice floor speakers with 15 inch woofers a 4.5 inch mid and dome tweeter then a powerful set of oversized vintage yamaha 3 way bookshelf speakers with 8 inch woofers another 4.5 inch mid and dome tweeter on those too and 2 active subwoofers one 12 inch 150 watt and the other a 10 inch 250 watt sub. Together it all sounds crisp nomatter where i am. Of course in corners of the rooms the bass hits hardest but the sound is more or less good wherever. Im a simple man so its all facing my couch

Just so happen to come upon your video. Thank you for it. I’ve been having major pro and can’t get my system to sound right. I have a L shaped room and my head is pretty much right where I have a partial wall. Wreaks havoc with my sound. I’m going to buy the book and I hope it can help my situation. Thanks again.

I am really not as sure as you, honestly, I feel you were a tad closer at loch ness.

Hey I have the VAC PA 100 100 tube amp that I bought back in 1995 and it still going strong!!, Interesting as I started all over the map with my speaker positions and ended up close to the 82% position rule 😅

Thanks to your great videos I got to know about the brand and tested the Dream 20/20 power cable. I found it truly excellent, very natural sounding and providing a noticeably more detailed sound and soundstage. Surprisingly the most improvement was obtained connecting it to the streamer transport a Lampizator Gulfstream the second to benefit the most the DAC a Lampizator Horizon. On the analog side the improvement was lesser the pre VAC Master still got a modest benefit but with the amp a VAC Statement just about no improvement over the JPS Aluminata in use. The manufacturer recommended a Claude Grande for that specific job so I ordered it along with three Dream 20/20. I should receive them in a couple of weeks.

My set up was easy, 20 inches from the wall, 7 feet apart, toed in slightly, set my T+A amplifier to free standing, and it sounds fine.

Its your money, spend it however you wish. If you were to do a truly blind test, where you are simply listening and identifying based only to your ears. I am very confident you would not be able to score statistically significantly above simply fliping a coin. "A fool and his money will soon be parted" : Ben Franklin 😴

Good video! When measuring the width of the speaker distance is it inside edge to inside edge, or from tweeter to tweeter? Thanks

Very informative and interesting. My speaker setup is already almost exactly at the 83% rule. A couple of years ago I had spent a lot of time moving the speakers to achieve the best sound. The formula ended up being about 1.20 X the speaker's width measured from tweeter to tweeter, which is nearly the same as 83%. I have seen a few videos where other audiophiles have ended up with similar results. 83% is good advice.

A lot of time invested ….Fantastic job!

What speakers are there behind in the video

Nice video. Thank you. I wonder if you should have included diagrams - such as the final settings you did for all those positioning. I think, it would do a lot of good.

Good guide, but I have better advice: buy yourself some decent headphones. If you place the equipment in a general purpose room, you won't be able to listen to music in peace anyway. There will always be children, a dog, a dishwasher, cooking, etc. In this case, spending hundreds of hours setting up the equipment is a bit... waste of time.

Hi Michael, I've owned a Puritan PSM 156 and the Ultimate power cord for over a year. This piece of equipment will never leave my system....one of the best acquisitions I've ever made. Another acquisition that will never leave my system, my Aperion aluminum ribbon super tweeter.....fantastic!

Lots of great info here. Thanks. I used the Sumiko method for placing my speakers and really got amazing results. However, you have to be prepared for the fact that the speakers won’t be exactly symmetrical in their placement. The Sumiko method really takes into account the room that everything is in.

no such thing as too much absorption unless your speakers are specifically designed to use side wall reflections. There is such a thing as uneven absorption which is often confused with too much absorption. But it's actually insufficient absorbers.

Stereo reproduction is imperfect inherently - it can't reproduce the same experience as listening to real sources. It does a great job for a simple practical system, but allways keep that in mind the limitations.

iM AGREE 100% WITH YOU

I have Harbeth M30.2 xd speakers (85db/6ohms) Do you think it would fit well with the pass labs int 60?

I spent a few thousand hours of listening tests back in 2000 to 2005 learning about the effects of gear and positioning. I agree that speaker placement is crucial for imaging and sound stage etc. I used some measurements but a lot was also done by eye but mainly ear. My speakers position were closer together to start with but once I changed cables and power supply and some preamp/amp mods, I then had to reposition speakers wider as the sound imaging etc had changed. I used around 1" increments of speaker movement to fine tune my sound. Also I originally used 2" slate hefty slab that my speakers sat on which gave me an amazing detailed and clear sound. But in the end I wanted a warmer sound so experimented with floor speakers direct on wood floor and that became the sound I loved most. In that house back then I used no acoustic treatment ( in a large room) yet my sound system sounded amazing. When it comes to speaker positioning there are certain general acoustics ( theory) guidelines to position speakers in both rooms or studios. However, it depends not just on the shape of the room but also on the construction of the walls, floors, etc, as to how close or distant the theory of acoustics will accord in practise in your particular room. Hence, percentages, distances etc are just guidelines and as you mention it's about experimentation. In my new place the speakers are in what acoustically would be considered the worst possible place, the corners! Yet I've got them sounding so good. But, in this case I have had to use acoustic treatment. Upstairs in another room I have my studio setup where the listening position would be considered the worst possible position, the centre of the room. However from experimenting it's turned out to be the best listening spot particularly relating to the low and lower mid frequencies exist ( standing waves). That's when you throw the rule book out and trust your ears. I think you can trust your ears after spending several hundred hours or more of listening tests because by then there is some objective insight which you can then you can appropriate that to your subjective like/enjoyment. For me fine tuning a system incorporates balance of sound in conjunction with an ' objective' sound quality, tailored to your own subjective taste🤗.

Wow, quite simply, this is a revelation for me. I'm getting a new amp (my last one died) and I can't wait to dig in on this book. Don't know how I stumbled on you channel, but sure glad I did! Thanks much !

I know that we all here are loving the music and I will share my findings with respect and humility. As is well understood today, the speakers are the least linear and even piece of gear. The room is the second problem and I will think that starting with room treatment before identifying the speakers and listening position locations makes more sense. Another, less understood issue regarding room acoustics is that the room has modes in low frequencies (dictated by the room geometry) and only above these frequencies one has to try to tame phenomena of diffraction, dispersion, reflection, absorption and so on. The lesson for me here is that I found the best sound only after going fully active using one subwoofer (four 18" woofers mounted vertically on a bamboo 1" baffle) and two speakers with an 80 Hz corner frequency. If using a smaller subwoofer, I will put the second one on top of the first one to preserve the cardioid dispersion and avoid comb filtering. Tried once a kind of swarm application, but came back to one subwoofer location, it's simpler and sounds better to my ears. Thank you for your video !

Could not awoid notising the speakers behind you having the tveeter in about same distance from three edges on the baffle. Its against advices, its bad for reducing or spreading difraction, maybe the horntweeter shoots audio waves past the edge...?

I like those bamboo diffusers below the speakers it's a good idea,its similar to what I have done. I got a felt sheep's wool blanket half an inch folded it four times and placed a bamboo rug on top works really well especially if you've got hard floors it's a must. Yeah definitely put some felt under there diffusers if you've got tiled floor and solid floor makes a difference work much better. you could try some carpet underlay sponge as well, that's what I put my speakers on makes a big difference.

I could not build that diffuser. Looks interesting.

I absolutely agree with you. They have to be completely honest about where their speakers are manufactured or they deserve to lose their potential customers..

I totally agree with you!! Getting mine next week

i love music, like most here if you're watching this type video, but this is too much for a multi-function room. i would probably go to this length in a dedicated listening room but not a family/living room. besides, i wouldn't have expensive gear anywhere near kids or family members that have no clue the investment we make in this hobby.

You described the character of this amplifier perfectly. The bass has mass, but it lacks contour and edge. I listened to the XA100.8 a lot, and although it wasn't bright, it was reactive. The source changes a lot. For some time I had Linn Klimax DSM/3 with Organic and Utopik at home. But it worked with my amp. The progress brought by Klimax was stunning (I normally play on Linn Selekt DSM/3 with Oragnik and Utopik. So the Source can change a lot.

That's pretty spot on, I had pretty similar experiences like you described just with different time frames and other gear (which totally makes sense). Some electronics deal much better with being unplugged or turned off than others but they all change their sound. The worst thing is if you unplug something for a very long time (I had some older dacs and amps unplugged for often several months and in two cases for years), you literally have to "re-burn-in" them for a lack of better words which takes much fewer hours than originally but you absolutely need to let them run music in low volume for 2-3 days in order for them to become listenable again. They just sound extremely harsh and fatiguing when you plug them in after such a long time and you are asking yourself "Have they always been that terrible? I don't remember them being so bad.". What I found works really well for a lot of gear is never unplugging (for no good reason), letting all gear in stand-by mode 24/7 (they already sound much better this way then turned off while often times only consuming like 0.5 or 1 watt) and turning tube gear off (but not unplugging it) since high quality tubes are too expensive to run them down like this. Doing this usually results (depending on the gear) for around 25min to become dynamic and engaging after turning on music and after about 45 minutes they already reach somewhat close to peak performance (so somewhat similar to what you describe in this video). Only after 3-5 hours some gear actually reaches max performance. I've been doing this for so many years and if I wouldn't hear that transformation all the time for myself all this would sound pretty weird to me but after having been in this hobby for so long I learned to trust my ears, especially if something happens reliably and in a repeatable fashion. Some gear benefits a lot from leaving it on rather than in stand-by mode while other gear doesn't seem to care much about it at all (given that you provide the gear a few minutes of warm-up before listening to music). So I would recommend most people to turn off tube-based gear as a general rule of thumb, keep everything in standby at all times (unless you leave for holidays and are worried about a thunderstorm coming up :-)) and experiment which specific electronics benefit greatly from leaving it turned on (also take into account that some gear like huge big class A mono blocks might consume hundreds of watts if you let them turned on all the time, so you might need to judge that on your own whether it's worth it). Great findings, that's why I run low volume music for a couple of hours straight through gear if I sell something privately and a guy comes over to have a quick listen. Good gear will then sound musical and engaging instead of cold and harsh. Don't just have it somewhere on the shelf disconnected for weeks or even months and then casually plugging it in. It mostly sounds pretty awful then.

Great content and all makes sense - especially for odd size rooms. I focus on the feel & beauty of my room. I’ve been in very good listening rooms and can hear the difference.

Isn't Fyne the new Tannoy ?

Just subscribed the channel❤

It's really interesting that I started out my personal hifi journey just like you described thinking that you focus on speakers, room and electronics and just top it off with some cables. It took me a while to realize that I you are throwing away so much performance when you don't address all the aspects of your system accordingly (adequate to the level of your gear). Blocking EMI inference, using very high quality anti vibration feet (not just a rack but alone) and using a custom power outlet have been my biggest revelations so far.

Nice video. Great book. I’ve had it for awhile now but with some new speakers I’m setting up I’ll be using these techniques again. Where did you find the test tone you used? Thanks

My problem , as i feel it , is that currently when i start to play a little louder (1watt+ on my amp) , certain frequvencys sounds really harsh. Up until 1 watt, it sounds really good ( Yamaha A-S1100) , i'm considering buying new speakers but every speaking i look up, their crossover is really cheap and bad, or the speaker costs $100.000. For me the most important thing is soundstage . I use a pair of 4way floorspeakers with 2x6" woofers in each and if i play 'Massive Attack - Mezzanine', the dinnertable in my kitchen vibrates.. so the base is totally ok for 6" woofers. What i think the problem is, is the crossovers, but sadly where i live, there isn't any "crossover genious" that can do measurements and tailor new crossovers - or i would do it. That being said.. listening to any of my Dire Straits records, or even CDs, give me goosebumps .

I don't see the PDF link.

There are hardly any Tobian speaker reviews out there. Looking forward to your review

Does the book mention bass floor bounce? It generally better to have the woofer close to the floor to avoid floor bounce. Generally this implies a minimum of a three way design with midrange & tweeter at ear level.

I never followed the golden rule of setting speakers with any of my speakers , even in the living room where everything was, I always listened to the system near field , i use the position of speakers almost like a giant pair of headphones , there are speakers where i like them less toed in and one meter away from me, and there are others where i listen to them almost in line with my couch on the sides , only about 50 cm or so behind that line , is not an exact science by all means , i find that this way i eliminate the most of the problems in a room , and its really like being there , you get immersed in the soundstage, i discover this with one of my first systems , (marantz cd63, marantz amp 44se mk2 and mission 751 speakers ) where i found that if i sat by the system, almost in the middle about only one and a half meter away , i got an impresive soundstage , and the effect from the room was mostly gone .....never looked back , and have being doing this also for almost 40 years, and now with the event of dsp even better , you can run a program to help to eliminate problem spots in the room. best upgrades are mostly common sense use ,...and for free!

This was real interesting. I’m having though of sound diffusion Will this work on dipole speaker like Magnaplanar

Ya that magic moment when they lock in, and your like no fuckin way!

Listening position is right in the middle of the room? Always heard that is a bad place to sit ..