Trying to tune a "rock" (components and rooms)

Hi TuneLand,

I was having a conversation with Michael today and as we were talkinng about high end components, I made the comment to him, "You can't tune a rock."



He knew exactly what I was saying in my inference of equating the design of some high end components to a "rock." You have and will never hear a musical note out of a "rock". So, why is it that high end audio has expected to get musical sound out of rooms and components which are built like "rocks"? When and where did this absolutely ludicrous idea come from? And to top it all off, what made high end designers think that by throwing a "blanket" over a rock that more music was going to be gotten out of the rock?

All I can say is that I'm glad I found the Tune 8 years ago. For so long in this hobby, the last really musical system I had was back in 1980 when I owned a lightweight preamp, designed by Stan Warren of PS Audio and his then new lightweight Amp One, also from PS Audio. That system could really "sing". After Stan left PS Audio and started his own company, PS Audio came out with their next new amp and my sound went downhill for the next ten years because I was trying to get that musicality back that I originally had in 1980 and could never accomplish this by what high end was teaching hobbyists to do through all those years. This was a really frustrating time time for hobbyists -- CD's were now taking over the music medium, components were being built like tanks (i.e., "rocks"), and we were told to make our rooms and its surfaces as rigid as possible, again like "rocks". All this lead to was more and more disappointment sonically. But, through experimentation on my own, I soon found that dampening, mass loading, and "trapping" were not the answers to how to achieve good sound.

I found the Tune in 1997 and the adventure to good sound finally came back for me. It really was not hard for me to give up the "old ways" of high end audio because I had found they did not work anyway, but until I found Michael, I had no alternative advice or direction to follow.

Belief systems are hard to give up and we all have them in some area(s) of our lives and high end audio has become nothing more than a belief system for the audio hobbyist after being told to proceed in a certain direction for so many years to where it is today. But, all this must be given up. It's to the point that when we buy a new home, if we are audio hobbyists, we must not only look carefully at our components but also at the construction of our homes. To give an example, I have a friend who lives in a 3 million dollar home and he built his cabana room (party room) with a real marble floor. Well, I visited him one Thanksgiving and in having a conversation with some people in the room, I could not hear what other people were saying who were no more than maybe 10' away from me Exclamation. The acoustics of this room were terrible, but the floor and the rest of the room were beautiful from a "visual" standpoint.

So, the point is don't attempt to think you are going to get good sound out of a "rock", be it a real rock, a component built like one, or a room or house built like one. That may be hard to swallow, but it is the truth. And, that's what we strive for here on TuneLand -- getting to the real truth about good sound, how to get it and how it works.
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Jim Bookhard