Audio Resurrected

Welcome Back!

I had a standard 5.1 surround-sound system in my media room, with its nice big 65" flat-screen TV, for some time. Powered by a Marantz AV receiver, the thing sounded just fine for TV and movies, but its performance for pure audio left a great deal to be desired. It was bad enough when streaming from a Bluesound Node through the Bryston BDA-3 that handles the digital-to-analog duties, but when trying to play records on my (very fine) turntable with its Grado Sonata cartridge, through a Musical Fidelity phono amp, the sound quality was simply unacceptable. And that's a big deal because I keep my vinyl collection upstairs, and so it's best to have a high-quality record playback system up there so I'm not trudging up and down stairs just to play my records.

It wasn't the speakers: they're Bowers & Wilkins models, after all. The main left and right are 805S models, some of the most wonderful non-tower speakers around. (In their current incarnation they retail for about $10,000, lots more than they used to be.) I combined them with some of the 600-series stuff -- two 603 satellite speakers for the back channels, a big hefty 600 series subwoofer, and the 600 series center channel with its three speakers.

For an AV-oriented 5.1 system, it was quite good. But as a pure sound system ... nope. That Marantz AV receiver just can't cut it for audio.

So I decided to nuke the idea of surround-sound audio with an AV receiver and go back to good ol' two-channel audio, but using superior electronics. Not long ago I retired a lovely Luxman 505u integrated amplifier, which previously powered the main downstairs system. It's now replaced by a Bryston BP-19 preamplifier and a pair of Schiit Tyr monoblocks. The Luxman is a standard 2-channel amplifier, but it has a pre-amp out that can drive a subwoofer just fine. But it doesn't handle Dolby Surround or anything like that. It's purely for audio.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that surround sound just doesn't do all that much for me. Nor do I like that most of the TV and movie sound comes out of that center-channel speaker. I'm not even sure I agree with surround sound on principle.

That's because any sound system will be playing within the context of a room, and rooms create lots of three-dimensional sound as the waves ricochet off the walls and bounce into each other. Any halfway decent audiophile knows that the room is an essential component of any good audio system. So to add extra speakers behind, and maybe even to the sides, creates sound that's all bollixed up with the natural room acoustics. To make surround sound system work properly requires an acoustically dead listening room, and that's not what most of us have. I found that most of the time I was turning off the back speakers anyway. They bugged me, even with Dolby stuff that designed for surround sound. Just too damn artificial sounding.

So: to make a long story short, I retired the Marantz AV receiver, the two B&W 603 speakers, and the B&W center channel speaker. I brought the Luxman out of retirement, connected the left and right B&W 805S speakers to it, and used the Luxman's pre-amp out to power the B&W subwoofer.

I connected my vinyl system – turntable plus Musical Fidelity phono amp -- to "Line 2" on the Luxman. (Line 1 gets the output from the Bryston BDA-3 digital-to-analog processor, which takes the digital signals from the TV, the CD/SACD player, and the Bluesound Node streamer.)

Playing a record on this renewed system was as though I had suddenly given my entire vinyl collection a major new lease on life. I had literally forgotten how wonderful a VPI Scout II turntable can sound with fine electronics and speakers of the caliber of those 805S jobbers. Not just better. Exponentially better, an entire order of existence better. So that's what's been wrong with the media room sound, I realized. I even said some fairly denigrating things about vinyl compared to digital in the not too distant past, but I was really reacting to the inadequacy of that Marantz AV receiver for playing records. Heard on the system as it is now, my vinyl LPs glow with a wonderful inner life. Oh, they're more trouble than digital, but there's a lot of music in there.

Everything is massively better. Streaming from Roon is simply glorious. In fact, this upstairs media room sound system has revealed itself as on par with or even better than the lordly downstairs system with its tower B&W 803Ds with Bryston BP-19 pre-amp, Schitt Yggdrasil+ digital-to-analog converter, and those oh-so-studly Tyr monoblocks.

And you know what else is a lot better? The sound from movies and TV. It may not be surround -- no back channel, no center channel -- but the overall sound quality wipes the floor with what I had in there before. The Marantz AV receiver isn't a bad product, but AV receivers are built to be jack of all trades, and they simply do not put audio front and center. At least not audio as I conceive it. And for me, audio matters more than picture, more than anything.

So my media room now has grandiloquent, eloquent, soul-stirring audio -- the way it is supposed to be. And to think I let that Luxman amp retire up in the media room closet for half a year ... well, now it's back and doing what it's designed to do.