Walls of Sound

The Walls Of Sound system does not lend itself to a normal review. It’s an in-wall system, designed with stereo parameters – rather than home cinema impressiveness – in mind. The ‘designed for stereo’ part perfectly fits our bill, but the ‘in-wall’ part makes it somewhat difficult to muster, because the transitory nature of review schedules do not sit well with things that are permanent fixtures to the house. This is a shame, because, in doing away with the boxes, you can make possibly the best sound that can be heard from home audio.

An Estonian Hi-Fi+ reader named Aivar (“no surnames please!”) read our July 2012 review of the Walls Of Sound concept and contacted Stuart McGill, the man behind the system. As a result, Aivar flew over from his native Estonia to listen to the system, then flew back and asked McGill to follow, meters and microphones in hand, to replicate the same basic system in his own modernist home by the Baltic. Sadly, Aivar is a very private person who prefers not to see his face in print, but in a way this doesn’t matter because the system is at once an expression of his requirements and more like music than many, so to see the speaker system is to look into Aivar the audiophile and music lover.

So, over the course of several months, Stuart McGill flew from London to Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn: a pretty, walled medieval port to the north of the country and not far from the Russian borders. In Soviet times, the fact the medieval town planners had future-proofed the town by making the streets wide enough to get a Zil down them meant that Tallinn became something of an apparatchik tourist haunt, and didn’t fall victim to Cold War town planning. The communists left, and were replaced by beer-fuelled Brits on a cheap booze cruise until the prices rose. It’s now an industrious and rapidly growing city full of nice pubs, good restaurants, great vodka, and achingly beautiful women!

Travelogue aside, we followed Stuart McGill to Tallinn to see the Walls Of Sound process in action. It begins, as it should, with measurement, with McGill taking readings of the acoustics of the room, typically focussing on the room’s frequency response and its RT60 reverberation times. While these can be altered somewhat by room treatment (that McGill is keen to advise on), the tests are to get a broad picture of the room itself and how to design a system to interact with the room in the ideal manner. This involves a choice of low bass units and precise adjustment to the system’s active crossover network.

A back-and-forth series of discussions between McGill and the client follow, as the system is designed for the room. Walls Of Sound still broadly divide rooms into one of five system solutions, but there’s a little more wiggle room now, and users can specify good, better, or best drive units for a given room size. Most, in fairness, go for ‘best’ – that’s what Aivar chose; high performance ScanSpeak Revelator drive units for the mid/high frequency ‘satellite’ boxes, but with two 320mm aluminium bass drivers for the subwoofers. There is a spot of trial and error and accommodation in terms of optimum placement for both main speaker and subwoofer, so the Walls Of Sound project is best undertaken during the ‘first fit’ stage of a home rebuild.

Anyone who has ever been fitted for a bespoke suit will recognise a close parallel here. The initial measurement stage is followed soon after by at least one and often two further fittings, and the whole process takes a few months rather than a few days. You want it sooner? Off the shelf audio for you! These things take time.

The active nature of the system has meant that Walls Of Sound has designed small, but powerful Class D amplifiers designed to take on some of the power amplification task. Aivar still has his Leben and Audio Note valve power amplifiers from his past system (which ended in a pair of Living Voice Auditorium speakers), but is in the process of migrating across to the smaller, more powerful amplifiers for his system. Aivar’s system also shows that your existing system simply plugs into the Walls Of Sound, without a problem. So, his excellent Kuzma XL4 turntable with matching arm and Air Tight cartridge does not stand out of place in this system; it blends perfectly.

Normally, I try to bring my own discs to a listening session, but traveling light, and traveling with my own photo equipment prevented that. So, I asked Aivar to play three pieces of music that best summed him up. The first – January by the Marcin Wasilewski Simple Acoustic Trio [ECM, CD] best summed up his stance; intelligent, sophisticated, and cool. The jazz put him at ease and he relaxed. The man was in his element, and the system just breathed music in the way we all wish our own equipment could. Truth is, I didn’t even need to hear those three recordings (one was Mozart, one was Led Zep, so the guy has diverse and classy tastes). It was clear his music was his passion, and he knew how to get the most out of that passion. Most and best of all, the music put a smile on his face.

Aivar gets it. He gets music. And someone who gets music gets the Wall Of Sound concept. It’s worth the disruption, the listening tests, the back and forth with tripods and microphones. It’s worth the holes in the wall, and it’s definitely worth the money.

Manufactured by: Walls of Sound

Price: on application (from about £10k)

URL: www.wallsofsound.co.uk

Tel: +44(0)1844 278845