stereo on

Sound in the new house! Yes, these are large panel speakers; for scale, that's a 70-inch plasma TV between them :-) . I finally bolted them to Mye Sound stands, and the Rega turntable is now on a wall shelf, but otherwise it's my old hi-fi in new location.

It still has a way to go: there's a lot of buzzing from electrical interference, and the sound stage seems hollow in the center (though wide as heck between the speakers). But records that up until now I've only heard on cheap systems are transporting, the detail revealed on Ys is amazing and you hear the sound around the notes that's completely absent in most audio playback. Optimizing the speaker location will take a long time; tweakers on the aptly-named Planar Speaker Asylum say a change of 1 degree or an inch makes a big change in sound. And I may yet spring for the RPG Bicubic Diffusor acoustic panels on the ceiling that Richard Bird of Rives Audio recommended (which cost about 4 times more than the speakers!).

Two friends have the same Magnepan MG 3.6 speakers, and they're also putting time and money into improving the sound. I see the appeal of the easy setup of a big box speaker like the Wilson Audio, but those cost tens of thousands of dollars and the soundstage and treble aren't any better.