Hi Steve, I’ll give you my take on HEA in general (briefly) and then talk tunable. As listeners we’ve all seen it unfold in front of us, but now is a good time to move toward answers.
You hit the nail squarely on the head "struggle for months to achieve the same sound at home". And most of the time the speakers (and other components) don’t click, and so we get back in that revolving door and start over with the next round of products. I came on the scene as a HEA dealer in the early 80’s fresh out of the pro world. In the music world I was use to tuning everything, even modifying studio equipment. Everything needed calibrated, EQed or tuned. No big secret right, every recording is made with a different sound. Then, Boom, out of the blue discrete hits high end home audio, and if you owned anything remotely resembling a tone control, balance, or even sub woofers for a while you were no longer "High End". Recordings didn’t stop being tunable (different), which was the whole reason for adjustments in playback. The HEA magazines in haste jumped all over "discrete" as being a marketing tool to sell and resale and even resale again to the same client. They never even stopped to see what they were doing. As designers you either jumped onboard or you got a less than favorable review, that’s a fact.
In 1989, in my HEA store I said "enough of this crap" and I started applying what I had learned in music. I first came out with RoomTune and TAS called it the "revolution". I visited about every HEA reviewer at the time and tuned their rooms up. In the next year I found myself having a factory and gained over 50,000 RT clients in 3 years. Easy to research this in the older HEA rags. Next was the tuning of equipment "ClampRak" and "AmpClamp" right along with that came the Tunable Speakers "Chameleons and Revolution Series". Everything kept evolving right up to the Tunable Room and reviewers were coming to TuneVilla to learn about tuning and I was also on the road teaching the Tune. It was still pre internet so I traveled non-stop. Then a few things happened in mid 90’s. Shortly after my first speaker review came out MGD (michael green design) vs Gallo and B&W, something happened that was weird. Certain magazines stopped visiting my show rooms. The behind the scenes gossip was HEA didn’t want to go "tunable". The high end had invested their money and placed their bets on big expensive chassis that produced One Sound (discrete). Tunable is the opposite of One Sound as we were demonstrating. Some designers came to me as friends and told me just to stick with RoomTuning, I was ruffling features and it was a matter of ad money. Keep doing reviews and following MG or have ads pulled. That’s when I started working again in the pro world. There’s more but that’s the history.
Bringing it up to date. Now the tide has turned from paperback magazines to online and anyone now with enough energy can be heard.
I want you to know I am a fan of the designers. I don’t think anyone is interested in making bad sounding products, not one. But we need to move to the next chapter or HEA will stall out. Listeners don’t want to keep buying a different sound, they want to be able to play their music collection to it’s best possible sound. Recordings are all different and we will end up back where we were when we had adjustability only more advanced now. I truly believe the big one sound systems days are numbered. Not because they don’t sound great in the right conditions but because this hobby is not about one sound.
Michael Green
