I’ll attempt to cut to the chase, but some background is required…
After a 3 year hiatus I’ve turned my attention back to the Celestions. I moved into this house about 2 years ago and I’ve not been happy with the way the Celestions sound here compared to my old room. I decided I needed to try something new, but after a very disappointing experience with the latest Kef Q Series speakers I decided the Celestions were my best option and so in the past month or so I’ve been working on getting the best out of them. During this time I have:
Applied basic room treatments.
Experimented with speaker horizontal and vertical placement (including Sub).
Experimented with Bi/Tri Wiring.
Experimented with Bi/Tri Amping.
Experimented with different Capacitor types and manufacturers.
Addressed cable management.
Tried different RCA cables.
The result of this is a sound I am (within the confines of this room) really quite happy with, which leads to the subject of this thread!
The Celestions are used for my Home Cinema system, which as can be seen in my sig uses a well reviewed but certainly not audiophile grade Receiver as a Pre/DAC/Streamer with my source being Spotify. I’ve never expected great musical results from this combination, however in the last couple of days it’s really started to surprise me. The dynamics/soundstage/3D (I don’t really know which one of these terms, if any, represents what I’m trying to describe?) of the sound this combination has started to produce over the last couple of days has me perplexed.
The sound is now far more 3-dimensional, sound moves and wraps around the room, it can be behind me, above me and whilst I wouldn’t go so far as to say it extends beyond the boundaries of the room it certainly extends beyond the speakers and there is a far greater sense of space and movement.
I am not surprised that tweaking and fine tuning the system has yielded improvements, what does surprise me is that I’ve only heard my system create this sort of sound when playing records. Now I’m really getting to what I’m trying to say!
My analogue system (as detailed under “Listening Room” in my sig) using the Celestions has always been capable of creating the sound I am now hearing with my Home Cinema, but only when the TT was the source, nothing digital (previously an Oppo 105 fed FLAC by a RPi) has ever had the same dynamics.
So my question is how? If it’s taken all of this tweaking to get the Celestions to sound like this with a digital source how come I’ve had a dynamic/3D/immersive sound from the TT?
Was there some magical synergy in my analogue gear?
Does it fall into the realm of psychoacoustics? Did my analogue system create a tone/timbre that hit my aural G spot and through the combination of the tweaks I’ve stumbled across a similar sound and I am just able to process the vibrations better.
Is it just good ole fashioned expectation bias? Has my sound not really improved that much, I’m just paying more attention and hearing what I want to?
(All listening has been done in Pure Direct with no room correction or EQ applied)