Headunit Test Bench Heaven

When I was a kid, I got a terribly dangerous science book that showed you ‘365 Things To Do’ Including taxidermy, it covered just about every mad boffiny thing a kid could get up to and had a chapter on how to set up your laboratory bench and room. I would dream of having such a well-ordered and set-out bench. Just for me and as well equipped as this little smug Yankee Barmcake kid’s in the happy-happy joy-joy illustrations of my book. Well now I have. And I am quite disproportionately delighted. A psychiatrist could tell you it comes from influences in my youth&;.
Thing is, I threw away some old kit and made room on my computer SoHo unit and Genesis’ Gordon Taylor has given me full time use of their lovely Stereo 100 amplifier I reviewed recently It is now the Talk Audio official test bench ‘Known Good’ amplifier.
That doesn’t mean that it’s the best in the world (mind you, I want to cop an earful of their £15,000 amplifier thingy in a live installation) but it is fabulously clean, able to transmit all the beauty put in at the front, right out the speaker outputs. The Clarion importado HXD2 top-end CD tuner that we just looked at recently too, was quite incredible and it’s sheer quality shone brightly right through this amp.
Of course being gifted a set of Bowers & Wilkins Leisure Monitor LM1 loudspeakers is a help. (I went to the Jaguar/B&W press event, loved every second of the day, met a genius who designed serious stuff like trains and 30 million cameras.) It’s like Forrest Gump said about money after his huge sponsorship deal with the ping pong company. ‘That’ one less thing to worry about.’
Bowers & Wilkins are top hifi speaker manufacturers, arguably the best in the entire world and their simple ‘Leisure Monitors’ are more than capable of being used as full on professional application near field monitors in this ex-studio boy’s pompous opinion! Quote me.
It’s all set up with a close to obsessive permanence in a column of cubby shelves and the speakers are on the top layer. It’s arranged so that I can run the speakers on headunit power instead of the ST100 to see what each sounds like just on their own chip. Also, I can run speaker feeds out from this lab stable power supply-fed quality amp to the mad end exotica like the Hybrid Audio Legatia speaker system. It can thus test top end speakers, headunits of all kinds and takes moments only to effect a change over.
Pictured here in cluttered packrat’s nest with the HXD2 in place.
Did I say I was a bit chuffed?