Balance is certainly a lovely concept, as well as a lofty ideal. But achieving an optimal sonic balance in a high-end audio system—whose final sound is determined, in part, by interactions among any number of components and that great bugaboo, the listening room—while maintaining some semblance of psychic equilibrium can be the hardest goal of all.
One dictionary defines the noun balance as "a condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions," as well as "mental and emotional steadiness." In the largest sense, balance describes the place where two or more opposing physical, moral, or spiritual states can coexist in harmony. Think hot and cold, yin and yang, masculine and feminine, passive and aggressive, love and hate, innocence and guilt, the astrological sign Libra (oops—just lost a few readers with that one),—or, in Marxist dialectics, the new synthesis that is the "combination of thesis and antithesis into a higher stage of truth."
Sounds fairly straightforward, eh? Ponder, then, this quote by Susan Sontag: "The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie." Assuming your mind isn't already spinning out of control, try applying Sontag's perception to the world of high-end audio and see where it leads you. Then see if you're willing to let anyone join you on the path, or if you already see yourself sliding down the slippery slope to the sorry states of Audiophilia nervosa or, even worse, Cancel my subscription!!!!
Recently, as I strove to fine-tune my system, I was haunted by thoughts of balance. The problem wasn't the quality of my components or a lack of synergy between them. Nor, thanks to room treatments, could I trace my dissatisfaction with the sound to any easily identifiable interactions between gear and room. Rather, I was dealing with the reality that when you assemble a system that's resolving and transparent enough to reveal minute shifts of timbre and musical expression, questions inevitably arise as to whether your perceptions of brightness or dullness, shallow or bloated bass, insufficient or overblown midrange, or inaccurately reproduced timbres were caused by some aspect of my system's sound I hadn't noticed before, or were inherent in the recordings themselves.
After trying a number of equipment supports. I discovered that different supports from different companies interacted differently with components, including the rack. Some tended to highlight the top end and lighten the sound, while others brought out the midrange and bass, thus darkening the sound. Might it be possible, I wondered, to find a balance of supports that would get me even closer to the goal of natural, open, full-range sound?
As I tried various combinations and permutations of supports, I became painfully aware of the distinction between brightness and brilliance. When a musical passage is intended by a composer or performer to sound brilliant, I want it to sparkle and resound with life without becoming irritatingly bright or noisy. Conversely, I want my system to reproduce lower-pitched musical sounds with richness, without making the overall balance of the sound too leaden, too weighty, too dark.
In the midst of my experiments, I attended a performance by a conductorless chamber orchestra that I'd previewed for the Seattle Times. The space was large, open, and naturally resonant, and the orchestra members were on the same plane as the audience. Seated just a few rows back, I heard sound so vivid, so saturated with colors, so alive and involving that I challenged myself to see if there was some way I could get my system to sound anything like that.
And so I dove into that space in which quest can become madness. Ah, yes—this combination of supports does bring out the piano's lower register. But did Murray Perahia really intend those left-hand notes to sound so strong that they rival and sometimes obscure and sometimes dominate the melody he's playing with his right? Wow, the timpani sure sound fabulous and tightly controlled in that recording of Mahler's Symphony 9, but did Mahler really want to so frequently draw attention to the cellos and double basses? And why is this simple accompaniment overwhelming the soprano?
In no time, I was perilously close to the point of no return—of finding myself forever a prisoner of the Land of Endless Tweaking. Or like my late neighbor Charles, whom I wrote about in "As We See It" in the November 2013 issue—constantly moving around little swatches of silk and rotating Mpingo discs by quarter-degrees in the hope that, with one more shift, perfect sound will be mine forever.
"Wait," I said to self—"I'm a Stereophile reviewer. Readers count on me to share informed opinions arrived at through careful observation. If I continue to switch out stand after stand, tweak after tweak, they're going to bury me with them." My consciousness seared by visions of Valkyrie Brünnhilde's funeral pyre, the flames fueled not by logs but by tweaks, I declared "Halt!"
"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." May the clarity of consciousness sufficient to simply sit back and enjoy the music be mine.—Jason Victor Serinus
