WHat about four speakers.......

I think I should chime in here, all of the above makes perfectly good sense and that was also the reason why I refrained from any experiments into that direction until I heard that Quad's Peter Walker had a speaker setup ( a wall of his stators) not unlike the one I had arrived at PLUS Quads (don't know how many though) arranged along the side (not back) of his listening room. When I had managed to obtain a pair of ESL63 from ebay at a very good price I started experimenting and finished placing the speakers at right angles from the main speakers halfway between them and my listening position fairly close to the side walls, firing at each other and giving them a dedicated amp and preamp, fed from the tape out of my main preamp, a Jadis 200. I have the dedicated preamp close to my listening position, so I can dial in the exact dose of side information for every piece I am listening to. The dialing in has to be done in very, very tiny increments and what is most important, seperately for the left and the right side, in order not to ruin sound stage information and the placement of instruments and voices therein. However if done right, it will give back ambience to overly dry recordings and add width and depth and a sense of immediacy to good ones. I will never go back to the classic setup and found this to be a great step forward in my personal enjoyment of my rig. However the step between enhancement and ruin of a presentation is very slight and it is frankly even more difficult than properly dialing in a subwoofer. I also think, that it is essential with such a setup, that main and side speakers should be of the same make, or at least similar in their voicing and characteristics and all this should not be attempted for the very reasons given above, if the auxiliar side speakers cannot be dialed in exactly for each LP, Cd or master tape being played. Cheers, Detlof

Plato, thanks for the address. This method has been widely discussed in Europe and widely acclaimed by the critics, but also here the public did not really respond in sufficient numbers, to make the whole project commercially viable.

Pbb, fankly I don't understand your attitude. Your post is full of interesting information. But then, why all that gall? If you find us here all so ridiculous or impossible, why bother with us? Shakespeare comes to mind, to me you have, what he calls a "jaundiced eye". Well on second thoughts, perhaps you need us, to get rid of your "humours", to quote him again. Hope you felt better after you had written that post. Only it is now us, who have all that bad air. (us = people, who think cables important.)Why punish us, if you are not interested to hear what we can? I don't get it. Respectfully,
Detlof

Pbb, thanks for the lengthy remarks from one curmudgeon to the other. Can't say that the quality of my reply -at least there where it was personal - was any less curmudgeonlike than your scorn, which promted it. You're right, must be a lunar influence. Cannot find any fault in anything you had to say in your last post, in fact I find that it makes very good sense, only the trenches you aim your fire from, don't seem mid-fi at all, or shall we say, your amunition certainly isn't. I'm a vinyl freak, but all the same, I cannot fault you in what you have to say about certain opinions here on A, which are indeed less than tolerant and abound with rash judgings. I've read TWL's post and just ignored it, because I knew he was wrong. But then perhaps the moon wasn't yet high enough.
Do you have a better word for micro-dynamics by the way? I think there is a difference between components, which swing the range between a fff and ppp very well, whereas there are others, which cannot do this, but excell in getting the difference between a pp and p or an ff and an f just right. Perhaps one should properly speak of the "rendering of micro steps within the dynamic range at the ff or pp level", or something like that. The term may be an oxymoron, but it is handy and it describes a bit of aural reality to my mind. Well, enough already, cher confrere, lets go out and enjoy the moon drawing water, or play football between the trenches, as they used to do on occasion during WW I on the Western Front, very sensible at that. Cheers!