I don’t just toe my C2s in for the sake of following the manual. I have spent a lot of time tweaking the position to get the most accurate and most expansive soundstage. I use Vivaldi’s Gloria (Academy of Ancient Music on L’Oiseau-Lyre) to set the toe in. It has everything: orchestra, chorus, ensemble instrumental and vocals, and solo instrumental and vocals. I tweak toe-in until it’s all dialed in. I also have a recording of early Baroque Hungarian music with a solo marimba track. It spans both channels as the performer play up and down the keys. I fine tune the toe-in so that I hear those keys seamlessly between left/center/right. Very small adjustments gets it right. Then I check with large scale orchestral works like Debussy, Mahler, etc.
If I were to set them straight on, I would have soundstage gaps in the middle. For reference they are about 7’ apart and I sit 9’ away from a front plane across the baffles.
Years ago I had Dynaudio Contour floorstsnders. I don’t remember which model. No matter how I positioned the speakers, I always had lumpy bass. I also felt they needed more separation between the speakers than the room could accommodate. I gave up. The contour bookshelf speakers that I tried performed better, but still had poor bass performance. My room, because of its construction materials presents a challenge for most brands. I have had good luck with Harbeth, SF Signums and now the Spendor A4. My dealer is a big Dynaudio proponent, but I ruled them out for my first Naim system, based on prior experience.
We talk about speaker position and room dimensions, but we often fail to consider room construction materials. Our living room is concrete, cinder block and wire mesh, with a skim coat of plaster. The floor is 18 inches of concrete with an oak parquet overlay. This poses real challenges for speaker performance and streaming as well. We had to hard wire. The only good thing about the construction is that noise transmission between apartments is rare.
My room is plaster on brick for two walls, and plaster on lathe for the other two. The floors are wood with a dense wool rug. I hardwire my NDX2 to ethernet anyway, although my mesh wifi reaches pretty well. Plaster walls can be a real PITA but I prefer them over drywall panels that can resonate and create their own acoustic challenges. I think of my room as sounding naturally lively.
Many rooms have that, and the cure, is likely to be a combination of speaker and listener positions plus either treatment or addition of a lot of very soft deep furnishings. Different makes/models of speaker will have the same problem if they have the same bass output.
the WIIM mini pro streamer got a software to play Tidal Hi res FLAC natively, and while I can’t hear a day and night difference, I like having access to the hi res files… I am happy
