Olu Sonuga
Handmade cables. Listening rooms. Forty years of records.
OPENING NOTE
The system is only half the story.
We’ve reached a point where most systems can retrieve detail. That’s no longer the problem. The problem is knowing what to do with it — and everything that stands between your system and the music it’s capable of revealing.
That’s a long list. The room. The setup. The power. The cables. The equipment choices that compound quietly over years. The recordings made with enough care to reward the effort. The artists and engineers behind them. The trends reshaping what’s possible. The scenes behind closed doors at audio shows, where the real conversations happen.
This newsletter is about all of it — but only as it relates to one thing: the Sweet Spot. That moment when everything in the chain stops announcing itself and the music takes over. Every audiophile knows what it is. Very few hear it as often as they should.
I’ve spent years building systems and tuning listening rooms where these differences aren’t theoretical — they’re immediate. This newsletter exists to close the gap.
“It’s in the retrieval of information that separates systems — and reveals the recordings truly worth owning.”
LISTENING NOTES — ISSUE 001
Diana Krall — “Too Marvelous for Words”
QUIET NIGHTS · VERVE RECORDS · PROD. TOMMY LIPUMA · REC. AL SCHMITT
Diana Krall divides listeners — virtuoso or stylist, depending on who you ask. That’s not the point. What matters is the consistency of the recordings she made with Tommy LiPuma and Al Schmitt. They hold up. This track is one of them.
Most people think this is a vocal recording. It isn’t. It’s a spatial recording that happens to feature a voice. The stage is vast, the placement deliberate, the bandwidth stunningly wide — lush, but not in the audiophile sense of rolled-off and midrange-heavy. Every element carries real energy across the full frequency range.
THE ORCHESTRA
Strings to the left, woodwinds to the right — placed deep into a clearly defined rear stage. Not suggested. Placed. The strings are airy; the woodwinds brooding. Their interplay pulls attention to the back while the rhythm section anchors the mid-plane. When a system compresses dynamics, this collapses flat. When it resolves them, the rear wall becomes visible. If you can’t separate depth from width here, you’re hearing your room, not the arrangement.
DRUMS & PERCUSSION
Set in the middle layer with a Bossa Nova ease that never intrudes. The cymbals are the tell: wood-on-brass contact, harmonic structure, decay into the room — a sequence, not a shimmer. Attack, body, release. If transients are smeared or the noise floor isn’t controlled, these collapse into a wash. That’s not the recording. That’s your system losing control.
THE PIANO
Wider than most systems will show you. Slightly behind the bass and guitar, ahead of the drums. At first it can seem right-weighted — then the left hand enters and the instrument opens fully across the stage. If that expansion never happens, something in the chain is collapsing scale. The recording itself is superb: even tone, excellent timbre, convincing hammer-on-string attack. Her solos are infectious. You’ll wish for more.
THE VOICE
Centered. Forward. Properly scaled. Barely above a whisper, but dense with texture. On a resolving system it projects with physical presence — not exaggerated, not etched. There is sibilance here, clean and controlled. If your system pushes it forward, you’ll hear it immediately. If everything sounds smooth, something is being lost.
FROM THE ROOM
CES taught me that bad rooms don’t hide problems — they exaggerate them. A lot of impressive systems hold together for five minutes. Then coherence starts to unravel — not brightness, not volume, just a slow loss of grip.
The rooms that work aren’t always the most expensive. They’re the ones where nothing calls attention to itself. In those rooms, the differences on a track like this aren’t subtle. They’re immediate.
SYSTEM TRUTH
A great recording doesn’t flatter your system. It interrogates it.
Most systems fail that interrogation quietly. Every element on this track was placed deliberately — depth, position, decay. These aren’t aesthetic choices. They’re tests. Pass them and you hear a performance. Don’t, and you hear music. There’s a difference.
Next issue: Not every recording announces its difficulty. Some of the most revealing music you’ll ever hear comes packed into a shallow, homogeneous stage where nothing has room to breathe. That’s where systems either earn their keep — or quietly disappear. Until then — find the chair.