I’ve been working my way through Stirling Trayle’s Audio Systems Optimization process over the past few weeks. My original motivation was simply curiosity, but the timing has turned out to be particularly useful.
Like many here, I’m waiting for the MSB Palisade. Before inserting another potentially significant component into the digital chain, I wanted to be reasonably confident that the rest of my system was capable of revealing what it does—or doesn’t do.
Stirling’s process has become an unexpected part of that preparation.
His approach goes well beyond conventional speaker placement. He looks at the listening room and system as a whole: mechanical vibration, electrical and acoustic noise, equipment setup, speaker geometry, listening position and finally voicing. You don’t necessarily have to agree with every premise to benefit from the discipline of the process.
One of my first surprises came while using a self-leveling laser to precisely match the height and rake angle of my Kharma speakers. While playing a bass-heavy track, I noticed the projected laser line moving vertically by roughly 1/8 inch on a wall about 14 feet away.
Something—speaker, laser, suspended floor, or some combination—was moving with the bass.
That was my first indication that there were things happening mechanically in my room that I had never really considered.
The larger lesson, however, has been precision.
I had already spent many hours and days positioning my system
and thought the geometry was quite good. Stirling’s process pushed me much further: speaker height, rake, toe-in and distance, with particular attention to making the left and right speakers as mechanically symmetrical as my decidedly asymmetrical room allows.
The laser proved particularly useful. Very small differences at the speaker become surprisingly obvious when projected across 12–15 feet of room.
I’m not suggesting that every 1/16-inch adjustment produces an audible revelation. What I found more valuable was establishing a precise and repeatable baseline. Once you know exactly where everything is, you can make a change, listen, deliberately go too far, come back, and know where you started.
The process also reminded me that measurement and listening are complementary tools.
I use REW extensively. It is invaluable for understanding frequency response, impulse behavior, phase, reflections, group delay and especially subwoofer integration. My ears are not going to tell me reliably whether a bass problem is centered at 44 Hz or 65 Hz. REW will.
But REW also doesn’t tell me everything I want to know about image focus, spatial information, low-level detail or how convincingly a recording becomes detached from the loudspeakers.
So I’ve gradually settled into a hybrid approach: measurements to understand what the system and room are doing, and careful listening to make the final decisions.
The result is that the system is now more revealing than when I started this exercise. Some of that has come from actual improvements, and some simply from removing variables and better understanding what I’m hearing.
Which brings me back to the Palisade.
When it arrives, I don’t want my evaluation to amount to plugging it in and asking, “Does this sound better?”
I want to listen for what it actually changes: spatial information, image specificity and stability, dimensionality, low-level resolution, transient information, tonal texture, noise floor and, perhaps most importantly, whether the presentation becomes more convincing without simply becoming more impressive.
MSB has set fairly high expectations for what the Palisade should contribute ahead of the Premier DAC. My hope is that the work I’ve done following Stirling’s process has made the rest of the system sufficiently revealing—and sufficiently well understood—that those differences should be easier to identify and describe.
In that sense, Stirling’s book has become an unexpectedly useful prelude to evaluating the Palisade.
The interesting part comes next.
