Yet that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build a compact reference system you just have to shift your notion of what a reference system looks like.Īre “Compact” and “Reference” Mutually Exclusive? After all, few audiophiles would describe today’s reference gear as modestly proportioned, multifunctional, décor-friendly, and intuitive to use, with speakers designed to work best against a wall. If you’re thinking about building a compact reference system, this list of requirements could be initially discouraging. Therefore, rather than a bank of intimidating controls, the system should offer an intuitive user interface, preferably on a handheld touchscreen device. Due to its central location in the home, a compact reference system will beg to be used by all members of the household. Further, components are more likely to find themselves in an attractive media console than on a row of equipment racks. Because our new listening space will be shared with other people and purposes, the system needs to blend in with the room’s furnishings and be pleasing to the non-audiophile eye. Yet performance shouldn’t suffer at these lower levels. Since adjacent neighbors don’t take kindly to bleed-through, playing-volume will have to go down. Higher-density urban homes typically have shared walls. In a downsized home, the multi-purpose nature and typically smaller dimensions of the listening space will relegate speakers to a position near the wall behind them. No more can speakers be a third of the way into the room. There’s no better way to save space on source material than to replace a wall of CDs and SACDs with their streamed or NAS-based equivalents, which take up virtually no room at all. The more functions a given component can perform well, the more suitable it is for use in a compact reference system. Separates, normally the coin of the reference realm, are too space inefficient. Modestly sized components only get us half the way there due to space constraints, we must also limit the number of components that comprise the system. But in this new context, where systems will be located in shared-use spaces like family and rec rooms, there’s no place, physically or aesthetically, for such extravagance. Most reference gear is unapologetically-even proudly-gargantuan. Requirements Refresherįirst, let’s briefly revisit the requirements that an audio system must meet in order to fit and function comfortably in a home whose list of luxuries, while potentially long, does not include a dedicated listening room: But just how hard is it, and what options are available to down-sizers? That’s the subject of this installment. This gap is what makes it challenging to build a compact reference system. Building a reference-class audio system in my new environment meant hewing to a set of requirements that, in many ways, ran afoul of today’s reference gear. These downsized dwellings impose a surprising number and variety of constraints on an audio system-a fact I learned from my own experience when moving from a single-family home in the suburbs to a city townhouse. P art 1 of this article described the demographic changes driving audiophiles of a certain age to seek smaller, more manageable, and more urban living quarters.
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