Adding sparkle

The finishing touch to a several hour's long meal preparation might be the setting of the table. The last little bit of work capping off hours of preparation. When I roll my sleeves up to muscle loudspeakers around a listening room, swap cables, restack equipment, and rough tune a system the last step is the finishing touches. Tidying up, making sure the eye candy on the front wall is perfectly centered, ensuring visual symmetry qualify as the last bits to get everything just so. Those finishing touches are important. I've witnessed poor reactions to system setup at a show when those touches have yet to be applied. When we're in the middle of setup at a consumer show the room is generally in chaos with packing materials, poorly dressed cables, and chairs scattered helter-skelter. Walk-in listeners have trouble separating the clutter from the beauty of sound. They quickly leave promising to return after we get the system dialed in. What they miss is the system was dialed in, though without the finishing touches. Often, it's those last bits of polish that create the sparkle.