My challenges have included a small room that’s acoustically difficult; bad ears (hearing loss at higher frequencies); a limited budget; and a personal prejudice in favor of minimalism. Over the years I’ve gravitated toward a three-pronged approach: minimizing electrical pollution from the home/grid, eliminating interconnect cabling, and reducing room effects. With that last in mind, one of my most impactful components has ended up being six nontoxic sound-absorption panels commissioned from Konto Acoustics, manufactured from Nordic peat moss, which hang on the side and back walls. Another is the convolution filters that Roon lets me install, which I generate using Room EQ Wizard, using Roon’s helpful instructions. A third is Roon’s own equalizer, that lets me compensate for my hearing loss. As I’ve tweaked the playback chain over the years each bit of gear pictured here has won my admiration and affection, but Roon’s multi-layered computational power (in my case running on a Nucleus+), which enables the filters and the EQ, have for me personally been especially transformative, and I’m grateful to the Roon team for the life improvement that’s brought.