- WRITTEN BY PULASTYA
It’s been a while since I visited my friend Makesh, who has off late shifted residence and subsequently moved into a much smaller place than where he was residing earlier. Smaller place means smaller living room, meaning Makesh was in a dilemma with regard to accommodating his Audio Rig, in the current stop gap change of residence scenario. Since he was to maintain his current set-up, he decided to do the best possible compromise, which was to scale down the speakers and avoid the subwoofer as well. With the speakers & sub moved to storage, a stop gap solution was found in the form of control 1’s which fit his stop gap requirements adequately. While at it, he realised that it would make sense to dabble into computer audio as well so that he could get a feel of what was in store for him vis a vis his dedicated CD players. In comes my little Asus DAC which gives him a glimpse of what can be possible with a small outlay in return for being able to play his music in wav/flac formats. We set it up and get foobar installed as the player of choice since it is one of the most reliable and easy to use players from the plethora of players currently available, plus its free. We start off with a rather uncomfortable phase with Makesh not being convinced of going the DAC+computer route. We try different speaker placements and things improve. However, its still not getting to the place where we find ourselves satisfied. Onto fiddling some more with the settings of the foobar player and vola! we get to a point where now it all sounds nice. Time to put the feet up, have a few drinks with accompaniments and start enjoying the music. Yes, it takes a little while but being patient in these matters helps as one can achieve very good results with entry level gear which can be bought very comfortably with little outlay in exchange. All it needs is some help from your friend and a little patience.