I don’t know how many folks have followed our first halting steps into the world of HiFi audio, but to say the very least, we’ve been on quite an odyssey. To be clear, you can take it much, MUCH further than what we’ve done here. However, like my enthusiasm for photography, I now feel like we’ve learned enough to continue learning at a slower, more reasonable pace. More to the point, we’ve reached a level of resolution that feels entirely reasonable and fulfilling, at least for the time being.
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| Here we're showing you a picture of an auditory experience. |
To put that another way, if we go any further with this thing, it’ll get SUPER expensive. This is not the goal.
If you missed the start of this journey, you can catch up via the posts archived below:
Journey Into Mystery: Building a Sound System on my Back Deck
Journey Into Madness: The WiiM Pro Plus & Our Household Sound System
To make a long story short, we wanted to make better use of the speakers we had in our house and to perhaps add a subwoofer, and that project got completely out of hand. If that’s enough backstory for you, great, but be warned that I will refer to past events in this story as if you understand them in full from here on out.
In setting up our new household sound system, my wife and I decided to move our record player into the dining room along with our extant Edifier powered speakers, while adding a new set of speakers to our living room. These new speakers would then become our primary household speakers with the requirement that they also be connectable to our upstairs TV via an HDMI eARC cable.
I gotta say at this point that I don’t really care about the surround sound aspect of eARC technology. HDMI technology is cool and all, but I’ve discovered over the course of this project that the main reason that movie dialogue sounds so low while movie music sounds so loud in most home theater set-ups is because most folks lack a proper center channel with enough heft to push the dialogue fully out into the room.
You can fix this easily enough, but not cheaply, and I personally have little to absolutely no desire to spend that kind of money on a surround sound amp plus all of the speakers it takes to get that kind of thing right. Maybe somebody could’ve talked me into a center-channel speaker, but there’s a lot more to it than that, and anyway, my living room is not that big. I have no idea where we’d put the peripheral speakers nor how we might wire them in anything like an unobtrusive way. Moreover, honest debate exists as to whether surround sound actually sounds better than good old-fashioned stereo sounds on your TV. Musically, no one records in surround sound; that’s always stereo.
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| Wharfedale Diamond 12.C Center Channel Speaker |
I learned all of this because the WiiM Pro Plus that we initially plugged into our TV can’t handle surround sound. It’s a great little device, but it’s set up strictly for stereo. So I then had to set the output from my TV to stereo by default, and while I was doing that, I also enabled the TV’s dialogue enhancement feature, and as a completely unintended side effect, the dialogue now sounds as loud as the music whenever we watch movies.
Go figure.
Having given it some serious thought, I’ve decided that I actually prefer my TV sound in stereo, and as it happens, I’m not remotely the only one who does. In fact, I’ve come to the opinion that no one actually asked for surround sound. It’s one of those expensive upsells the market pushes on an unwitting public in order to charge more for existing products that already worked perfectly well. I also just bought a new Subaru, and it has so many of those.
I should maybe note here that we have a surround sound 5.1 soundbar set-up on our TV downstairs, and it is cool when we’re watching a big-budget blockbuster. Like something from the Star Wars saga. However, it’s also typically underpowered on the center channel, and there’s no way I’ve found to adjust that via user settings.
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| WiiM Pro Plus |
Whatever we did as far as our primary speakers went, we knew that we wanted this solution to be compatible with the WiiM system. Firstly, because WiiM makes good stuff fairly cheaply. Secondly, because we wanted to be able to use the WiiM WiFi network to stream sound from our record player to the rest of the house. This seemingly basic bit of technology is actually hard to come by, especially if you want something with more bandwidth than you can typically get via Bluetooth.
This still left us with zillions of potential options in our price range. After some weeks reading reviews and generally obsessing over all of this, we narrowed it down to a couple of bookshelf speaker choices.
The latter two are generally priced in the $350 range on Amazon but require an amp. As noted, this was always going to be the WiiM Multiroom Streaming Amplifier. By comparison, the Klipsch speakers cost about $400, but they’re powered speakers. However, hooking them into the WiiM system would require a $90 WiiM Mini at a minimum.
Bottom line, all of these solutions looked to cost between $550 and $600.
I’ll admit that I really lusted after those KEF’s and decided to just wait until they went on sale. But then I saw a pair of Wharfedale Diamond 12.0 speakers on sale for $249 and bought them immediately. The 12.0’s are a little smaller than the ELAC’s, but they’re on par size-wise with the KEF’s, and more to the point, they are unquestionably five-star speakers. I considered the slightly larger 12.1’s, but those run $100 more, and honestly, our living room is not a particularly large space. We then got lucky because the WiiM amp went on sale the next week, and bottom line, we got the whole set-up for right at $500 plus tax.
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| The KEF's are really gorgeous. |
It turns out that the Wharfedales are designed to be bi-wired, meaning that while you can use a banana clip and a single set of speaker wires for each one, you really should run separate wires to the two speakers’ woofer and tweeter posts. My extant 14-gauge copper-jacketed (outdoor) speaker wire was gonna be way too wide for that, so I also had to buy some new, solid-copper 16-gauge speaker wire, and because the Wharfedales are really meant to be mounted on speaker stands, I also bought some new silicone footing bumpers. For whatever it’s worth, speaker stands look like a real pain in the ass.
I put all of this together without too much fuss. We then moved our record player and our old Edifier speakers into our library until my wife can refinish the new table she bought at a local second-hand store to showcase this stuff in our dining room.
I’ve got to say that the sound in our living room has been incredible. Oddly, I really noticed it for the first time watching highlights from the Georgia-Alabama game last week. ESPN recorded that game in full-on hi-def 4K, so if you have the equipment to hear it, the sound is truly amazing. That stadium seats 90+ thousand people, and among other things, you can hear some jackass in the background blowing a vuvuzela. All told, the video includes a truly overwhelming tapestry of sound. In experimenting with this thing, I’ve also realized that Apple’s AirPlay system sounds infinitely better than any of our other streaming methodologies. You’d think that Spotify Connect would sound the best, but for whatever reason, we’re getting Spotify at fully 900 kbps via AirPlay versus the standard 320 kbps available straight off of WiFi. That shouldn’t happen, but I swear to you that I can hear the difference.
Amazon Music streams at even higher rates, but we haven’t gotten around to trying it yet. Amazon Music is available via four-month free trial, but we’re so deep into Spotify’s ecosystem that Sally and I will probably wait for them to launch their own HiFi service whenever that finally occurs.
Coming back to our record player, it’s maybe worth mentioning that the new system is so sensitive that we can actually hear the audio losses coming off our records. Vinyl is great, but it’s not remotely as detailed as true high-def digital audio. I knew this intellectually, of course, but this has been the first time we’ve ever been able to actually hear it in practice. Alas, that’s a mixed blessing at best.
We’re done with this for now. Eventually, I would like to upgrade our kitchen audio from the Amazon Echo 2 that’s currently there, and at some point, I’d like to get some kind of portable speaker to put out by my grill that we can also hook into our outdoor TVs when we watch football games. I can think of a couple of ways to do both, including several that overlap.
Thankfully, that is a problem for another day…
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