Sal's ➶ ⋆˙⟡

Reorganized the desk, plus a hifi splurge

I’m nearing completion of a desk reorganization. Don’t we all love a good desk reorganization??

My last setup had two complete workstations side by side on my desk:

This setup allowed me to use top-tier stuff for each purpose. I wrote about this a bit in my post about the Studio Display.

The quality was nice, but the setup also posed some issues. First, the two monitors barely fit, making the desk look cluttered and busy, especially since each setup had its own keyboard, mouse, and trackpad (on the Apple side).

Second, the two monitors left no room for speakers.

[Warning: backstory imminent]

I’ve had a dream since my teenage years of someday owning a kickass hifi rig. If you like music and you’ve listened to it through a great stereo system in a reasonably treated room, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a different experience. Someday, I told myself, when I had the money, I’d have my own.

I got close several years ago when I had some pretty nice-for-me nearfield studio monitors on my desk (Equator Audio D5s). That was back when I was still trying to create music here and there, so I went for studio monitors rather than typical stereo speakers. Still, I thought music sounded amazing through those speakers.

Then the pandemic happened. Like many tech workers, I got a stipend from my company to buy home-office stuff. Fueled my money and angst, I bought way too much shit for my desk. By the end I had:

The desk, with all its contraptions and appendages, looked like it might come alive and attack me.

Eventually, provoked by complexity overload and even greater pandemic angst, I ripped everything off the desk and went minimal: one monitor, my laptop, a keyboard, a trackpad. I sold the two Dell monitors and got the Studio Display, which was a great help in the simplicity effort since it includes speakers, a camera, and microphones. I kept the Equator speakers for a while in my closet, but eventually sold those too.

That was nice for a while. I wasn’t playing games at the time, considering myself too old and busy for them, so the Studio Display was all I needed.

But the pandemic threw me a curveball. My friend texted me one day to tell me that his friend, another dad whom I hadn’t met, was becoming kinda depressed. (No kidding. The pandemic was brutal as a parent of young kids.) That guy’s wife had reached out to get a group of dads to play video games together as a support group of sorts. I got an invite, and my wife, in all her fabulous glory, told me to go for it.

And so back into PC gaming I went. I ordered a bunch of PC parts and found a 4k gaming monitor on Craigslist. Complexity crept back into my home office. At first I kept the PC and its monitor in a closet, pulling them out and setting them up only when they were needed, which was about once a week if we gamerdads kept to our schedule. But eventually I ended up with the setup described at the top of the post: two workstations side by side, with my gaming tower stuffed behind the gaming monitor on my desk.

Back to the speakers

Over time, thoughts of those old Equator speakers crept back into my brains. They sounded so good. With them, I had more or less achieved my dream of a great (for me) stereo, but lost it in my simplicity spasm. I wished I hadn’t sold them off.

But even if I’d kept them, with my two monitors side by side, there was simply no room for anything other than small speakers. I tried some models over the years. AudioEngines, Presonus Eris, and most recently, the Vanatoo T0s. They sounded better than the Studio Display, for sure, but they just can’t do what larger speakers can do. Though, to their credit, I didn’t have the free desk space to position them properly. They had to be clustered under the Studio Display, limiting the stereo spread. (Also to their credit, they were too close to the wall and my room is in a concrete basement, completely untreated.)

Get to the point

Okay, okay. I decided to downsize so I could fit full-size speakers on my desk.

The monitor

I sold the two monitors, downsizing to one that can do a reasonably good job at both office work and gaming (the MSI MPG 321URX). I did this with trepidation, as I really love that Studio Display.

But I’m happy with it the MSI. It has a built-in KVM, so I can share a USB hub between both my office Macs and my Linux machine. I mainly use that for the microphone and USB DAC for my stereo (see below). It works well, and the text is sharp enough for office work. Plus, the refresh rate is great!

The speakers

I was planning to buy another set of nice powered studio monitors (targeting the Genelec G Three / 8030s), since they’d keep my desk relatively tidy. But then I stumbled into a screaming deal on a pair of used ProAc Response D1s. These are traditional bookshelf speakers that require a separate amp.

This wasn’t my plan and would require more desk clutter, but these were also much nicer speakers than I was considering. After a bout of frantic research, I decided to go for it. I was interested in listening for fun, after all — not critical listening or audio engineering — and the ProAc speakers are more spiritually aligned with that purpose.

I ended up buying a Brio Rega Mk7 amp to power the speakers. I was antsy about this because my original goal was to avoid having an amp altogether, let alone spending $1,200 on one. But it seemed like the sweet spot in price and quality between the budget stuff and high-end, cork-sniffer tier. Plus, I was able to buy it from my local stereo shop, which has been in business for almost 80 years. That made me happy. I would’ve had to order the studio monitors online, as there don’t appear to be any Genelec dealers nearby.

The system sounds amazing even in my untreated room. If I close my eyes, the speakers disappear into the soundstage. And the dynamics on good recordings are sublime. It routinely surprises me and makes me smile. I’m happy.

The microphone

I didn’t realize how good I’d sounded with the Studio Display’s mic array until it was gone. I started using my Macbook’s microphones, which sound fine. But multiple people at work noticed the difference, commenting on how good I used to sound compared to most people on virtual calls. One guy said I used to sound like Casey Kasem. 😂

I dug my old Samson Q2U out of my closet and bought a boom arm for it. Now I sound better than ever, albeit at the cost of some desk complexity.

Wrapping up

And with that, I’m about settled into this new desk setup. It’s more complex and visually noisy than minimalist rig, but much less so than my two-workstation approach. And now I finally have my nice stereo. Good times.