2026. Simple stereo. These words will seem obtuse for a bit, but you can skip down to "The Setup" if you aren't interested in my bloviating.
I have an ongoing conversation with a good friend of mine, about relocating as both of us relocated our families quite far away. After being dis / relocated for a couple of years, I realized that although the place we leave behind may be a geographic location, some part of us stays there, and some other parts don't survive the move. We are still talking that one through and we are trying to be patient with ourselves to allow ourselves to grow into a different place, a different life, and in a lot of ways, grow into this different person that we become.
That is a strange way to frame a stereo hifi, but it is one of the things that survived the move. Not the boxes themselves, but the desire, the need, to listen and be moved by music. I put on certain pieces for a listen and I am transported to another place, time, memory. It isn't the system, but it is what the system can do to connect me to a person, different than I am now, that lived in a different place at a different time.
And it is the music that does that, that reaches inside, past my physicality, to affect me in a way not describable with words, in a way more base than hunger and longing. I could get just as much from my iPhone and earbuds, because it is about the music for me, but I do like having a simple hifi, to be my transporter, a time machine, like an old film projector that plays back family movies, snippets of those that have grown up, moved on, passed away. But I digress.
The Setup:
This setup hasn't changed much in years, of which I am proud. I have been able to stay a course to keep it simple, to make the exploration about music and emotion, not technology and measurement (although I respect that, and anyone's search for the elusive limited perfection).
Two boxes, a pair of speakers, one set of interconnects and a pair of speaker wires. And an ethernet cable. I have had the Marantz Streamer / CD Player since 2020 and it has been so good, bringing no attention to itself. I use it 99.999% for streaming. As streaming catalogs have grown, I just don't find myself thinking about CDs right now. But anything can happen.
I have the Marantz wired to the network using a Netgear Powerline device to connect to the router over the wall outlets. One less wireless device in the house.
I take the variable outputs of the Marantz into the W4S amplifier via a Blue Jeans LC-2 interconnect. I had a LAT interconnect prior, but it wasn't long enough, so I am trying the LC-2 and I think it is great. The W4S amp, which I have had for about 15 years, is four channels and I am currently using the 250 watt channels to drive the Metas. At some point I'll try the 125 watt channels to see which I prefer. I drive the speakers with LAT International wires, which I have had for about 20 years. I used to run the Gallo Ref 3, but moved them into another system (
A Quiet Place).
I like the Metas, they are a bit of a chameleon, a small speaker that, under the right conditions with the right placement, can pretend to be a much larger speaker if the room will allow it. They also hide the sound of their enclosure pretty well. They sit in the living room which is open to the kitchen. The total square footage of both rooms is about 820 square feet, which may seam like too much for the Metas, but our house is very quiet, measuring right around 25dB, so music at 65dB feels plenty dynamic, and the Metas can handle that well enough.
I could be tempted to say I am done for now, but I think with the size of the room, I want to explore adding very minor room treatment. CostCo has some Artika panels, so I might get a couple packs and put some panels in a corner. Our place is very sparse, and I like that, helps keep my mind clear, but that means there is an appreciable amount of reverberation and echo. I'll be thinking about it.
Previous Description from 2020 (before the move):
A modest hifi - a Network / CD player directly driving an amplifier. I'm really enjoying how the Marantz and W4S work so well together without a preamp.
I got away from hifi a few years ago because over time, I had strayed from an essentialist philosophy to enjoy music, to pursue better, an enemy of enjoyment. I thought about extended bass. Room response, better. I bought another black box, then another black box. I made it overly complicated - subwoofer processor, more amplifier channels, more cables, more remotes. I was listening more to the representation of the music, instead of the music itself, so I lost my enjoyment, and listened less and less. So when I got really busy in life, the hifi went into boxes and storage for several years - I had lost site of what had mattered, the enjoyment of the music.
Being away from it helped me think differently when I came back to it. I'm still just as busy, but I realize that what I get from emotionally investing in the performance of the artists, allowing them to affect me, is time well spent. The pursuit of better only distracted me from being present in the performance. So after doing some listening and trialing and thinking, I pulled out all the extra black boxes to distill it back down to essentials.
In the comments, I put a bit of a running log about my thoughts along the way. Here is what I have removed:
Velodyne SMS-1 processor
Musical Fidelity x10 tube buffer
Sony HD FM tuner
Bryston B60R
All the associated cabling (4 interconnects), power cords (2 cords, 2 warts), and remotes (3)
