Introduction

As a home based business, Signature Sound's demonstration rooms take up two full rooms in my humble home. This does not include the former dining room area which has been converted into my office (see pictures below) and space used for staging, inventory, storage, & packaging. The goal here of this page is to give you an idea of our set-up in a kind of virtual tour which we hope you enjoy. As well, and unlike other dealer Websites you may visit on the web (on a number I've visited you can't even find the street address, the name of the owner, or whether they are full time retailer or not - all your get is an e-mail address!),  I do not hide the fact that we are a home based, full time, Hi-End Audio retailer.

Rich Brkich, Owner - Signature Sound

Be it ever so humble . . . My office area occupies what used to be the dining room area in my home and is my LP collection is parked. As you can see, I am running out of space for record (LP) storage. Unfortunately, I spend most of my days here talking to you folks and processing orders, and not in the main listening room which is just several steps away. If you look carefully, you can see my all Rega office system (Radio tuner, Brio or Mira integrated amp, and Rega R1 speakers) which I listen to most of the day. I'm in process of getting a long enough set of speaker cables to put the Rega R1 speakers on some old 30" tall speaker stands which will flank my desk back by the windows on the left and right. Not exactly optimal speaker positioning, but it should make listening to NPR and the local jazz radio station a bit more entertaining during the day. Now if I could only convince Rega to add a remote volume control to the Brio, I'll be all set!

The Main Listening Room

The main room is just over 11' wide, 20' deep, and has a 7.5' ceiling. This room is used for demonstrating our best high end gear. Note the various room treatments on the side walls, back walls, and in the corners of the room in the pictures below. This room has dedicated high power electrical circuits to power the system in this room. Speakers are situated well out into the room to allow them to deliver their best possible soundstaging performance for a dedicated listening room of this size as well as taking into account the space needed for equipment and equipment racks which have to be behind the speakers in my set-up. I've spent more than 15 years with this room and after many experiments over the years, this layout delivers the best results for a room this size. The speaker placement, which appears far out into the room (it is), places the listening position about eleven feet from the plane of the speakers. This does place the listener about two to three feet out from the wall behind the listening couch, but that wall behind the couch is covered with some custom made diffuser/absorber panels I designed some years ago.  The overall result (as many customers can attest to) is quite good.

I always keep only one pair of speakers set up at a time in the main listening room, though for this picture I could not resist showing off both the Merlin VSM and TSM speakers. This is one of the reasons why demonstrations are done by appointment here at Signature Sound. When a customer makes a appointment, we set up in advance what electronics and speakers they wish to listen to. The listener sits on comfortable couch which can seat up to three people and faces our coffee table that is always cluttered with various magazines, CDs, etc. while listening. You will note the distinct absence of ANYTHING video from this room. It is meant, and will continue to be, a audio only listening room.

A look at the old listening couch in the main listening room and the audio geeks coffee table (which is usually a bit of a mess). The CD storage rack behind the room tune contains a little more than half of my CD collection and to its right are other room tune and customer made diffuser/absorber panels to handle side wall reflections since this room is a bit narrow. The old listening couch is getting long of tooth and is due for a replacement soon. Anyone know where I can get a good deal on a nice couch?

An older (circa early 1997) picture of the main listening room showing the Merlin VSM
speakers set up in near-field powered by the Blue Circle BC-2 mono-block amplifiers.

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