The Apartment Audio Project

I am living in an apartment now, a nice one at that, and that changes everything. No DIY and no subcontracting either, at least for speakers. The amplifiers still can be built, but there are limits there as well.

The first thing, then is to source some decent looking speakers. Since even the ones I built sounded acceptable, and my level of acceptability is high, any commercial speakers should do. If I follow the buy and sell program that I suggested the speakers will cost almost nothing: buy, get it shipped to me, and then sell int online. The cost of shipping is the only cost needed.

The speakers available are Denons and Onkyo for about $ 30 but with shipping costing more than twice that at about $50. $80 in all, I am looking into reducing the price of shipping.

In the interim, I am using the SONY XBS-10 Bluetooth Speaker as an output. A single point source, it compares favorably to a full system : the bass is sufficient if not thumping good, and the vocals are clear. Unusually equalization helps here a great deal with clarity, and upward sloping equalization helps here with the highest frequencies boosted the most. With this setting, and the volume turned up substantially, music can be listened to and explored. At last checking, the system was much better than my car stereo, which had developed an awful distortion, most probably due to the speaker deterioration. I used to tag along the BT and listen in the car.

An old phone, the HTC Explorer, was brought into service as a source. Not connecting to the bt speaker I used a BT receiver and connected it to th Auc port of the BT speaker. The sound was acutely improved with this setup the BT receiver I noticed was a better quality, of better DAC perhaps, we dont know.