The new sittingroom is finally wired for sound - although it took all evening to lay yards of cable underneath the floor, and to wire up our 240-volt converter. It sounds OK. Not awesome, but good enough.

Is there something missing? Gabriel Weinreich has some fascinating insights:

Most popular music today is created electronically, and so can be heard only through loudspeakers. The question of fidelity becomes trivial. By contrast, if you want to reproduce perfectly the acoustical experience of being at a string quartet concert, you're out of luck...
Playing a solid body violin through Weinreich's prototype speaker, I was astonished by the degree to which the violin's characteristically undistinguished sound became suddenly responsive to vibrato. The sound took on something of the beauty usually associated with old wood, worn varnish, and Italian labels. As a violinmaker, I have spent years trying to coax this kind of quality from my owninstruments. Now here it was, emerging in full flower from the open ends of four plastic sewer pipes...