I've now finally finished setting up my system (sistem), post moving house last weekend, and thought it would be worth making a few comments about the results on two things. - I've been testing a replacement interconnect for Zanash that he put together for me - Implications of a different room on sound The Interconnect ============ Pete (Zanash) and myself have been exchanging mails for a couple of months now. He built several digital I/Cs for me to try out between my DVD player and DAC (now sold), one of which was so good that I kept and paid for. The experience was pretty fun, and Pete then proposed to try his hand at I/Cs between my CDP and amp. To help with context, I use a Teac VRDS-7 connected to a Nait 5 with a Chord Cobra 2 cable. The initial attempt with a cheapy custom built cable was pretty good, although not quite as good as the Cobra, slightly missing in life. So, Pete had another go. Don't ask me what the cable itself is, haven't got a clue (pete, can you add specifics on this please). The connectors are clearly of quality, although the Din plug that goes into the Nait is not a locking type, and the RCAs at the other end were incredibly tight until I "negotiated" with them using a screwdriver. Having now burnt in the cable over several weeks, I finally got around to swapping back to my old Cobra 2 (£75 new I believe) and am happy to give the results. Easy summary, Pete is definitely onto a winner with his custom cable. It has more bite, bass depth, detail, definition and simply sounds far more lively and interesting than the Cobra (hardly a bad cable itself). So, big thumbs up from me. Pete and myself will be chatting about thoughts on what to do with his services on this. Maybe big Tone might want to use some of Petes services in his new venture? Room positioning ============= As already mentioned, I've just moved, and thought it would be worth mentioning some of the implications. My system has moved from a rectangular box shaped lounge to a slighty odd shaped lounge which is now somewhat bigger. I think the old was about 6x4.5m, and suffered with major room resonances in the bass, leading to a rather large "hump" in the bass at around 40hz, which simply refused to be quelled by any attempts at tweaking. The new room is about 8m long on the North wall, with the West wall running perpendicular to the North wall, and is about 5.5m long, all pretty std stuff so far. The south wall however is a big long curve, connecting to the bottom of the west wall, then curving into a 1m wide door that is at the Eastern end of the Northern wall. The result is a room with no real directly opposing walls (hopefully good for eliminating standing waves). Halfway along the northern wall is the main doorway into lounge, and all the system is sited to the west of the door next to the north wall, firing south. And the findings: - Having a rather odd shaped lounge really does work. Almost all of the bass "hump" that I used to have has now gone. I tried a frequency test disk that came with my REL sub, and it showed a MUCH flatter bass response, excellent stuff. Of course that took a little getting used to at first, but now I have, it's great - In my old flat I'd used a pair of concrete slabs under my Kabers to attempt to control the bass bloom. In the new place, I didn't think I'd need them, so removed them to check the result. The bad news was that when I started critical listening yesterday, it really wasn't nice. Just a big wall of sound from the system, more than a little grating. Putting the slabs back under the kabers made a huge difference, removing some "glare" and knocking down the wall, replacing it with musicians who were individually placed and doing their stuff, awesome. - For the sub, my initial setup in the new place was to fire across the room, i.e. at 90 degrees to the direction of the speakers. Hmm, not so good, bit of a loss of definition. So instead I placed it between the speakers firing in parallel. Good improvement again, far more cohesive. In short, I now have a system that has all the key aspects that it used to have, but without the bass bloom from the old room. Well that's one way to justify the cost...