Well, I suppose my year was not unlike many peoples’. I worked from home the entire year. But I was able to do most of my work in my listening room, listening to my system when I wasn’t on a call or web conference.
My system remains a mac mini running Audirvana/Tidal, Mytek Brooklyn Dac+, zbit, 25th Anniversary Zen and open baffle speakers made up of the Lii Audio Crystal 10s and the Acoustic Elegance LO15s. I also run a super tweeter at times.
I did do some tweaks over the course of the year and found some new music. I’d be interested to hear what other did.
I decided to forget about my old speaker and chair placement and follow some online advice. I experimented with the “proper” distance of the speakers from walls, toe in, chair placement in the room, etc. If I had any silver bullets, I’d link in a article or video, but after all the experiments, I ended up in exactly the same position as I had before for both speakers and chair. Moral of the story is trust your ears.
Given how much I listened, I changed out power tubes but my UFO25 tube compliment remains relatively unchanged. I tried other tubes but again gravitated back to where I started. For input I use the 1975 Reflektor 6N23P Silver Shield. Power tubes are the 6P15P-EV I got from Steve. Sophia Aqua rectifier. Sylvania OA3s in the back and I forget what funky regulator I have in front by Lon turned me on to it.
My Mytek Brooklyn DAC+ was relatively new when this all hit. Progrob did stop by at one point in the year and blew me away with his Denafrips Terminator DAC.
https://www.denafrips.com/terminatorAs a result, I played around with settings in Audirvana and ended up outputting DSD128 to the dac because I thought it got me closer to the sound I heard with the Denafrips.
With my DAC having a separate RCA output, I started running that into the Crown amp which powers my Acoustic Elegance LO15 woofers in my OBs. I found that better than running the “magic cable” off the speaker taps on the 25th. Seemed to dig deeper, but I’ve since measured it and it looks the same on REW, so I don’t know what it did.
Anyway, I kept missing the low low bass in some electronic music so I tossed a 15” sub I made back into the system. I got a couple of splitters and run the same DAC RCA output to both the crown and a plate amp. There are some swings in the low end signal below 50Hz but I now get 20Hz out of the sub and REW shows it actually going a little lower.
I was tempted to buy the new Lii Audio Silver 10s but decided to stick it out with the Crystals. I really get good sound out of these C10s so I am hanging on to them. Progrob has my F15 based OBs on loan still. It will be interesting to listen to those again at some point.
I did find a QRD diffuser build that was relatively inexpensive. I posted about it in the room treatments forum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3Wv9eB6wrg Two QRD13s for around 90 bucks is pretty reasonable.
One other DIY build that I did that produced some really nice results were these speaker wires:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfjQJxeTANEI didn’t want to spend much on it since it was an experiment, so I bought what I think is the same wire and rope on ebay:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/12TC-PTFE-OCC-Speaker-Cable-HIFI-Audio-Wire-Power-Cord-...https://www.ebay.com/itm/7-16-in-x-100-ft-Solid-Braid-Poly-Rope/174538087557?ssP...They needed some time to break in but these offer and very smooth, detailed and sophisticated sound. A definite lift in quality for around $100.
I found a good amount of new music by just running Shazam in auto mode while I watched audio review videos on Youtube while working out. I mostly put it into existing Audivana playlists but here are two I haven’t shared yet (I think). Mostly, these are background music playlists while I work. One is fairly chill while the other has more electronic with a repeating beat. I don’t know why, but I found that to help when I was working.
https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/df228179-7fe9-48b2-b7ed-b832aeaf236dhttps://tidal.com/browse/playlist/4aed1475-f128-44fc-91b7-858a59e75d06The next decision date on whether we go back into the office is July 1. While there are some downsides, I sure don't miss commuting to downtown Chicago every day and I don't care if I never get on another jet again.