Small active speakers + tube pre-amp+ Nos Dac....
But in nearfield listening room acoustic matter in spite of the general belief...😁 I even use two wood screen to decrease crosstalk in some way in a mechanical way waiting to buy the BACCH filters ...
The mechanical controls of vibration and resonance by tuned damping and a sandwich of various minerals and wood and sorbothane plate ( granite-Oak-bamboo-cork -shungite plates) ... I used more than three times the weight of the speakers over them to damp them and granite heavy block on my desk with sandwich of various materials for the coupling-decoupling process under them ...The improvement was stunning ... A metamorphosis ...
The EMI shielding with shungite plate...Which tweak i myself designed with copper tape ...
The modification of the design of the tweeter and of the rear porthole matter a lot ...( my 4 inches woofer now go 50 hertz instead of the specified 85 hertz) I dont need a sub ... Timbre perception is very important and there is no natural timbre with 85 hertz of bass ... And integrating a sub is costlier and more complex, more easy to improve the speakers for me as i did ...It is why i will never bought small closed speakers without porthole ... Redesigning the porthole improve the speakers and put them in another level ...
All this cost me peanuts because each piece of gear was carefully chosen ....
My main system is not speakers in nearfield but headphone ( the only hybrid ever designed which beat my speakers for naturalness and soundstage holography "out of the head".... ( AKG K340 driven from the headphone out of my powerful Sansui alpha 607i , no headphone amp can drive them properly 😁)
I own a secondary headphone S.S. pre-amplifier with tone controls for my AKG K701 which so good they are are like trash compared to the K340 ...I used them for movie at night ...Not music ...
Near field listening to be optimal need acoustic control of the room corner where the speakers are located ...
Small speakers are rarely good even those well reviewed as mine were by Steve Guttenberg when i bought them ( M-audio av 40 ) if you dont pay thousands of dollars i guess ... I hated my actual active speakers for 10 years and never listened music with these "pieces of trash " in my mind ... They shined only when desesperate with nothing else to use i create an acoustic dedicated corner and modify them as described above with a new porthole a more complex one with a bigger volume well tuned with different straws ... The tweeter was redesigned for near listening too ...I add a tuned wave guide with cardboard tube ....Dont laugh... The result is stunning on all acoustic count... No headphone can compete i ever owned ( 2 Stax, one magneplanar many dynamics) save the K340 which outshine them for speaker-like more realism with deep bass ...
My wife is almost deaf then i listen music alone ...
I dont feel any frustration or envy for big speakers at all ...Designing a dedicated acoustic room for big speakers take me one year full time ... I will never do it again , it was fun but once you know and learn something, revisiting it is less fun and will take perhaps a bit less time but anyway a very long time for the mechanical ears tuning ( i used a grid of mechanically tuned Helmholtz resonators ( 100 resonators from 8 feet to few inches ) 😊
i am happy with my near-field listening ... It is less stunning than my past acoustic room with big speakers but i learn to be happy because it is more complicate ... And anyway my actual headphone compete even with my past speakers/room ...
Dont buy the akg k340 by the way ... Out of the box they need to be modified and optimized ,they are old now .... Or buy them and sell me another pair .... 😉
In a word near listening is another kind of listening as headphone are ... Not a stop gap... A simpler way to listen music which can rival big speakers especially if they are less well embedded as it is mostly the case ( not in the bass for sure even if i am happy with clear 50 hertz) ...
