I have been an audio guy since I was 3-1/2 years old. My parents had given me a Seabreeze turntable equipped with a built-in amplifier and a single mono speaker. It came in a small case with a lid. I learned how to load several records onto the spindle and press the start button. This prompted a satisfying three-movement event: the first record dropping onto the platter; the arm gliding over to the record surface; the needle dropping into the first grooves. I was given a decent collection of vinyl, with Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Mozart among my favourites to listen to. I guess this was a way to calm down an ambitious three-year-old and provide a music lesson in the process.

Obviously, I could never have imagined then that one day I would be travelling through Europe, the UK, and North America helping people get better sound quality from their hi-fi setups. Some great memories of my journeys doing so include barreling down the German Autobahn at 250 km/h, and racing down back country roads at 120 mph through the English countryside in an Aston Martin Vanquish. I spent time in Jena in former East Germany at the Zeiss Vision Care, a preeminent eye care clinic, where my vision was tested with state-of-the-art equipment that diagnosed and treated my eye conditions. Fortunately, I still have 20/20 vision. I visited one of the best guitar museums in the world in Umea, Sweden. I was driving well over the speed limit in Stockholm in a Porsche 911 S4 trying to keep up with my audio friend in his car as he took off in wild abandon toward the Porsche dealership to fix his rear wing.

Over five separate trips, I visited dozens of hi-fi dealerships and optimized more than a hundred Linn audio systems in London, Stockholm, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen, Nuremberg, Erlanger, Barcelona, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Belfast. I visited many smaller towns and cities, such as Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, New Castle, Brighton, Nottingham and the Isle of Wight in the UK. I also visited Groningen, Den Bosch and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Gerona in Spain and other unique places, like Stonehenge in England and countless famous castles and churches.

I went biking in Amsterdam, Heidelberg, and Wales, watched Volkswagens being manufactured in Wolfsburg, Germany, and got to see the remains of the Berlin wall, Checkpoint Charlie, and post-Soviet East Berlin.

After Europe, I made my way to Linn owners in the USA and Canada. Hitsville USA in Detroit rocked my world, and the Johnston Space Centre in Houston, Texas, made me dream about space travel. Travelling to Bozeman, Montana, I got to drive to Yellowstone Park and explore it’s many wonders, and on another day I explored the origins of the Missouri river by canoe. I helped people in British Columbia, Ontario, Washington state, Michigan, and Texas. I helped Linn owners around the world through video chats. 

I helped people in various ways with their Linn systems, but the main reason for my visits was to apply Linn’s proprietary DSP application, Space Optimization v.1 (SOv1), to the listening rooms of people who found the software difficult to master. Space Optimization is built into each of Linn’s music streamers, to adapt the speakers to the room layout and manage room modes. SOv1 also provided the ability to alternate between four discrete digital filters to compare their sound as the music was streaming. I strived to get the best streaming sound quality from countless combinations of speakers, electronics, and listening room layouts.

A Life Changing Experience

This was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life and was, in fact, life changing for me. I travelled across the western world to meet almost complete strangers I only knew through the Linn forum, or over phone calls or video chats. One thing I discovered was how international our hobby is—it is borderless—and how united we are as audio hobbyists, regardless of where we live.

From this experience, I learned about courage, trust, diplomacy, problem-solving, and patience. I documented everything I applied to my friends’ hi-fis, to see if there were common patterns to different hi-fi systems and room configurations. After a while, I started noticing there were, and my method of applying SOv1 deviated from the official Linn method. This resulted in a more simplified approach and allowed me to get not only quicker results but better ones than when I began this journey.

The people I visited were overwhelmingly kind and generous. They provided me with fantastic memories of my time with them. They often made me feel like a valued member of their family, if only for a day or two, and I even became a sort of mentor to some of their high-school or university kids. I posted my daily Linn experiences on the Linn forum, and I felt so blessed.

Application Of Space Optimization Version 1

Never having even been on a forum, I joined the Linn Audio forum in 2011, which had 30,000 members. I contributed many posts but initially had little useful knowledge to contribute. Over time, I learned  a lot from forum members far more capable than myself. I immersed myself into the audiophile world of best practices and upgrades. 

Linn introduced their Space Optimization (SOv1) software into their digital music streamers to address room modes that muddy the sound and obscure middle and high frequencies. Room modes are inherently caused by the room layout and room acoustics, as well as the speaker type, speaker placement, and the sitting position, among other factors. 

Applying the SOv1 algorithm requires actual measurements of the room, the speaker positioning, and the listening position. These dimensions are input into the SOv1 program and the algorithm calculates the room modes at different frequencies. 

Once the room modes are calculated, the SOv1 software generates an inverted graph that shows the room modes, each peak of which represents the frequency, bandwidth, and gain for each room mode, as shown here:

I used the Tune Dem method, created by Linn founder Ivor Tiefenbrun, to compare sounds and find the optimal speaker position. As per Linn’s website, “The Tune Dem is a way to compare… two products and decide on how easy it is to follow the tune and appreciate the musical piece as a whole on each one—this allows you to hear quite clearly which product sounds better.” Tune Dem emulates how a musician listens to the music, to allow them to play compatibly with the other band members. I follow the tune in my head, but I also get a sense of the music in my body—if I find myself tapping my toes or moving to the music, that’s a good sign.

Using the SOv1’s four filters to correct the calculated room modes, my best results were achieved by adjusting the calculated frequencies, bandwidth, and gain, as you might with a parametric equalizer. 

As I applied digital filters at specific frequencies, I could fine-tune the music, much like a piano tuner can tune a piano. I could adjust the calculated room modes, or eliminate certain calculated frequencies and replace them with a custom filter.

When Linn released its Space Optimization software, it soon became apparent by the comments in the Linn forum that many people were having a hard time understanding the concept of Space Optimization and knowing how to apply it to their systems.

I also had a hard time with it at first, but as I kept playing around with the digital filters, I started to notice concrete ways to make the sound better. I honed my skills on my own system and then used what I’d learned on several of my friend’s systems in the Vancouver area who were also Linn owners. My Linn dealer heard what I was doing and told me that some of his customers would be interested in having me visit their homes to use SOv1 on their systems.

A Wing and a Prayer With a Large Dollop of Courage 

After I’d worked on about 20 different people’s systems in Vancouver, I gained enough confidence in my knowledge of SOv1 to post a notice on the Linn forum stating that I was willing to travel to the UK or Europe to help others use the software on their systems. There would be no cost to them for my services since I couldn’t be sure to what extent I could be helpful to people, and besides, I did not have a work permit to work in Europe, the UK or the US.

I paid my own travel expenses to visit people by plane or train. In later trips, some people contributed towards my transportation costs. My hope was that people could provide a spare bed for me to sleep in or point me to a nearby hotel. My secret hope was that my hosts would give me a tour of their corner of the world so I could sample their culture and local cuisine, while being part of their family for a day or two.

Crazy idea? Absolutely!!

But everyone provided me with a spare bed in their home or booked a hotel room for me. My first trip included England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, with side trips to Barcelona, Spain, and Frankfurt, Germany.

My hosts also invariably made me try the local cuisine and showed me great attractions. People were so generous to me and each visit has become a golden memory.

Visiting People’s Homes, SOv1 Adjustments and Tweaking For Better SQ

A typical visit to a person’s home involved arriving at the train station or airport, where my host would be waiting for my arrival. We would drive to their home and I would familiarize myself with their sound system before listening to it with a number of reference tunes. I would examine the room layout, the hi-fi equipment setup, speaker placement, cable management, power supply, and the state of vibration control. The most important part of the visit were the listening sessions using a variety of reference recordings, followed by making DSP adjustments to tame room modes.

Cable management was a big issue in many homes, where I’d see bundles of intertwined power cords and signal cables behind the hi-fi racks or cabinet. I would take the time to separate the interconnects, Ethernet cables, and other cables from any power cords. I found that close proximity of signal cables to power cords could have a drastic effect on sound quality, resulting in harsh highs, bloated bass, and a collapsed soundstage. 

I encountered various electronic components plugged into a single inexpensive power bar, where mini refrigerators, fans, TVs, or HD boxes shared the power supply with audio components. I saw hi-fi systems worth hundreds of thousands of dollars plugged into $10 power bars.

When required, I would use masking tape to mark the original position of the speakers, then move them until the soundstage and center imaging snapped into focus. Usually the improvement in sound quality was significant enough that the non-audiophile spouse wanted to keep the new placement configuration (at least while I was visiting).

People I visited to treat their room with Space Optimization needed to have a Linn DS or DSM digital music streamer equipped with the software.

On later trips, I would bring a torque driver to the homes of my hosts to adjust the torque of their speakers’ driver bolts, as per discussions with other audiophiles who had spent the time to evaluate the best torque settings for specific speaker drivers. Torque values varied between 0.65 Nm to 2.0 Nm depending on the speaker driver, with bass drivers requiring higher torque values than midrange ones and tweeters. In my own system, I would even torque the circuit boards inside the electronic components to 0.6 Nm. Yes, it made a difference to sound quality when dialed in correctly.

To do my SOv1 evaluations, I used a dozen reference tunes, listening carefully to specific excerpts of the song, for specific auditory cues. I contacted people before I left Vancouver to ensure they had downloaded or ripped the specific reference songs that I used for my listening tests.

Those songs included:

Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” from his Legend album. This song features deep bass guitar and drumming at the start, followed by backup singers. Using the custom filters, I would tailor the sound for tighter bass, more midrange clarity, and a better sense of musical timing. I would separate the bass guitar from the bass drums. By removing bass modes, the mids and highs became much more revealing, giving singers more room to express themselves and consequently more emotional weight.

Norah Jones’s “Turn Me On” from her album Come Away With Me. In the first minute of the track, Norah’s vocals can become a bit shrill if the system is not set up properly. With SOv1, I would cancel out the harshness to create a more relaxed rendition of Norah’s voice.

Lou Reed’s song, “Walk On The Wild Side” from his album Transformer. With SOv1, I would improve the solidity of the opening stand-up bass line and, more interestingly, adjust the back-up vocals of the Do-Do-Do girls so they could seem to almost leap out of the speakers and onto your lap.

Diana Krall’s “A Case Of You” from her album Live in Paris. I could adjust the gain at specific frequencies in my custom filters to mitigate the sibilance in parts of Diana’s voice. That said, sibilance can also be caused by the type of cables being used or by their proximity to power cords. Moving cables away from power cords or using better-shielded cables can remove sibilance.

I also used a variety of tunes by Nils Lofgren, Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel, and Oscar Peterson. I also used reference tunes favoured by those whose homes I visited, so they could judge the effects of SOv1 with material they were familiar with.

Going to someone’s home, I had no idea what kind of setup to expect and my expertise was a work in progress. I was trying to figure things out as I went along. Sometimes I went to sleep at night with no solution on how to solve a specific room acoustic issue. I would often wake up in the morning with a possible solution that more often than not worked out.

I had many instances where I was about to leave for the airport or train station, not being completely satisfied with a final result, but then suddenly becoming inspired to try out one last thing that proved successful.

If I had only 24 hours to visit with someone, I usually applied SOv1 when I first arrived, then my host and I would go out to see the sights for a couple of hours. When we returned later in the afternoon, our ears refreshed, we would listen again. This resulted in further adjustments to SOv1 that yielded more refinements. We would then revisit SOv1 in the evening and first thing next morning. I would often get much better results if I had two days or more to adapt to the room’s layout and make adjustments.

All Good Things Must Come To An End?

With each trip, I learned more about how to use SOv1. When I returned to Canada, I applied my newfound knowledge to my own sound system, and continued to help people in the Vancouver area. 

I made amazing friends on my travels, many of whom I still keep in touch with. They were instrumental in helping me get through Covid times.

Sound Optimization v.1 has since been replaced by v.2 and is no longer supported by Linn. I’ve updated my streamer to SOv2, and for music played in 5.1 surround I found it useful, but for streaming music in stereo, I had already done so many component upgrades to my hi-fi that mitigated my room modes that I didn’t need to use SOv2.

The SOv2’s development was overseen by a consulting physicist and goes much further in its calculations than SOv1 did. Room measurements have to be more precise and detailed. Calculations are based on room dimensions and speaker placement, but also now on the building materials used in the listening room’s walls, floors and ceiling, and the location of the doors and windows. They take into account if the windows are single or double pane glass, if the walls are partition or internal, and if the floor or ceiling is suspended. Air temperature and humidity are other factors that come into play. The calculations are so complex, SOv2 is cloud-based, unlike SOv1’s algorithm, which was performed on a hard drive. SOv2 also dispensed with custom filters, a feature I liked in SOv1 because I felt it made it easier to finesse the sound by ear.

And sadly, the Linn forum I posted news of my Space Optimization journey on was shut down a number of years ago. Many of us shifted to a new forum but it was not the same for me. 

Life After Travels To Europe and North America

I look back with great fondness at my Sound Optimization travels and all the great people I met there. A few of those people have ventured to Vancouver to stay at my place and explore British Columbia.

I still help people with Space Optimization, but now I do it by video chat. It’s obviously not the same as being there, but it has given me more time to work on my own sound system, which has never sounded better. It’s something else to be grateful for.