High Fidelity sound equipment has been around for over 40 years. But whereas it was originally a pursuit of enthusiasts only, nowadays millions of people have equipment capable of reproducing sound to a high standard.

In particular the advent of CDs brought quality reproduction down into the mainstream of audio equipment. Inexpensive CD players are able to provide a low maintenance, clean, accurate sound quality. Nevertheless it shouldn't be thought that all CD players are the same. There are differences in the quality of manufacture, the steadiness of the rotation of the CD, the absence of any vibration, and most importantly the quality of the digital to analogue converter circuitry which converts the digital signal recorded on the CD back into the analogue signal which gets amplified and fed to the speakers. 

However, although the signal from the CD player is consistently good, there are huge variations in the other components in the system. If you want good quality sound there are two things you cannot compromise on. Good speakers, and a good amplifier.

But even if your equipment is lo fi, or even mid fi, there are several things you can do to improve the sound.

Firstly, position the speakers properly . It's amazing how many times I see speakers on the floor, up against furniture, even behind furniture at times. Small speakers should be located up off the floor, use chairs or stools to experiment. The ideal height is when the tweeters are about the same height as the listener's ears when sitting. They should be away from the corners of the room and far enough apart to provide a wide stereo image without a "hole in the middle".

The diagram below shows an ideal layout.

Notice how far away from the walls they are. You may not be able to leave in the best position permanently but you can always pull them out when you are going to have a listening session.

Once you've heard that positioning the speakers like this makes them sound better you'll probably want to find a permanent solution for the stands. If you check our DIY pages you'll see a very simple design for speaker stands. There are also several in the ACCESSORIES category of products.

Next thing to try is speaker cables . In order for an amplifier to control the movement of the speaker cones properly it must be able to send quite large amounts of power in rapid bursts. Thin cables hamper the signal flow so that you will never hear what the amplifier and speakers are capable of producing. Speaker cables are a whole subject in themselves and you'll find lots of information in the DIY section. But suffice to say the cables should be substantial, more like the electric power cable used to wire up a house rather than the thin flex that is often supplied with modest priced systems.

As an example a ME 850 power amplifier can produce an instantaneous current of 70 amps - this is similar to the current required by the starter motor in your car! So it's no wonder that heavy duty speaker cable is required to allow such a large pulse of power to pass through to the speakers without restriction. And as well as this large current capability, the cable has to also allow all the frequencies from 20Hz to 20KHz to pass through without colouration or phase change. A great deal of experimentation has been done on all sorts of materials and configurations for speaker cables and there are number of websites where you can research this if you are interested.

But if you just want to see if you can hear a difference on your system try a length of solid core 240V mains house wiring cable on each speaker. You can get it from any hardware store for about $2 a metre.

One simple tip which is so obvious that it shouldn't need mentioning is to keep the volume below the level where obvious distortion (harshness) occurs. On most cheaper systems it's usually pretty easy to tell when that point has been reached.

If you look at a waveform of a piece of music you can see that there is an enormous difference in the signal level between a quiet section and a loud section. This difference represents a multiple of some 1000 times. Your equipment has to be able to cope with such variations if you want to hear music reproduced realistically.