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It's one of the best systems I've ever heard - and yet you nor I can buy it. And you can only hear it if you have access to the Deparment of Electronic Systems Engineering at the University of Essex. It was my first taste of Malcolm Hawksford's writings put into practice, and I left the experience a whole lot wiser. If not as blissfully happy/ignorant as when I entered his laboratory cum playground.

Many readers may have heard a close facsimile of the dream system at one of Malcolm's demonstrations at The Hi-Fi Show, and the system has been written about in these pages, as well as in Stereophile so it's not exactly a mystery. But to my shame and embarrassment, I've never had the time to attend one of the demos at the Ramada Hotel, so I unsurprisingly felt sheepish when I asked how long the system he was using had been in its present form.

The answer came back: 'Years'. It's front-end was just about the only thing you could buy off the shelf, a Meridian 508 used as a CD transport. From there on, it was almost entirely custom-made by Malcolm, Richard Greenfield and LFD.

The Meridian fed Greenfield's in-house converter driving a custom made digital volume control. No pre-amp per se was involved, just four mighty Burr-Brown 20-bit DACs and LFD-made power amps (best described as 'modified PA1s') driving - I kid you not - Audio Physics Tempo loudpseakers. Only, for this system, the crossovers had been removed.

The amplifiers, by virtue of the heavy DSP content of the system tailoring the amplifiers to the speakers' specific characteristics, were able to drive each woofer and directly. LFD supplied the interconnects and speaker cables, too, so the system was entirely a Hawksford/ Greenfield/ LFD production between the transport and the speakers themselves. Radical though the system was in so many ways, what struck me most about it was not the short, direct digital signal path, but the way that the physical set-up confirmed certain venerable practices.

Sitting in the hot seat

Not least were the speaker's severe toe-in and careful distancing from the walls, unsurprising as Joachim Gerhard at Audio Physics is Teutonically fanatical when it comes to preaching about the importance of precise speaker positioning. But it also vindicated Wilson, Sonus Faber and a bunch of other manufacturers of dynamic loudspeakers who insist that in most situations the ideal set-up of the audio triangle will have the baffles of the speakers facing directly at the listener rather than firing forward. Sit in the designated hot seat, and you'll find that the Tempos in the system are so perfectly aimed at the main listening position that you cannot see the sides of the enclosures.

Alas, most people never enjoy this unsullied a set-up because, to the eye, it seems too extreme. We're not used to such severe toe-in; even if we were, it creates what might be deemed an anti-social, unacceptable hot seat optimised for only one listener. But then, you can argue that most die-hard audiophiles want precisely that: because listening is usually solo listing.

But back to the sound. Malcolm was most indulgent and allowed me to play mono Dean Martin recordings, soundtracks from the early 1970s, and other stuff a far cry from Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene or even the Spice Girls. What was apparent regardless of the material was transparency and information retrieval of such a high order that one could detect previously missed small details - even on recordings familiar to the point of tedium.

Particularly exciting was the way that the system demonstrated conclusively that discernible depth is available from mono recordings, that image height is no mere imagining of crazed 3-D addicts. And yet this hyper-clean, hyper detailed system never sounds even remotely like a warts'n'all studio set-up. While I'm sure it would prove as to a recording engineer or producer as any package of studio origins, it remained, undeniably, a pleasure machine, and I have every reason to believe that the onset of listener fatigue would be as long arriving as it would with a tube/electrostatic system.

Given Malcolm's commitment to ensuring that our digital future isn't Hell on Earth, this work-horse system can be used to show just how good an all-digital (or all-digital) system can sound even with today's basic CDs. Mine were standard yet transcended their origins when fed into the optimised digital system.

Stereo Setup

But let's not jump the gun: as much of Malcolm's recent work involves system set-up as it does exploring/exploiting the potential of digital. Along with Joachim Gerhard and Bernd Theiss, he presented a paper to the Audio Engineering Society in Copenhagen in May 1996. [Available as Loudspeaker Placement for Optimised Phantom Source Reproduction Preprint 4246 0-7.] It deals with the re-creation of phantom images - the foundation of stereo playback - in detail, taking a set-up methodology similar to David Wilson's (which is targeted at open-minded audiophiles) and presenting it to an audience not normally known for accepting empirical arguments.

In other words, the system at Colchester and the AES paper go a long way to establish credibility and respectability for an accepted practice, which raises no eyebrows in the audiophile community. Furthermore, Hawksford and Co have presented an even more repeatable, or if you prefer, scientific method than Wilson's for setting up dynamic speakers for a two-channel system.

Although the paper, wisely, contains phrases like 'it is somewhat dependent on the loudspeakers being suited to the task' or 'Not every loudspeaker works equally well in this set-up', it is still a recipe for almost fool-proof optimising of a two-channel system's speaker placement.

As for actually buying a facsimile, well, LFD says that plan are afoot to make it commercially available, but it would necessitate, for example, using dedicated connectors to make certain that users don't install unsuitable components, or connect a given amplifier to the wrong driver. But from what I heard in Colchester, sacrificing a little flexibility or compatibility is a small price to pay.

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