Can you smell what Brando's cooking!? - Page 12

tsloms> No progress as I was concentrating on getting the No Quarter ready for RMAF today. Once work slows down at the end of the month I'll finish the BBV2

Penn> I haven't read much, but with the downsides of reducing gain for the DSP I suppose there would a preferred method. What have you read?

We probably only played three songs on the No Quarter and Jon's NeoD. Very good comments from the guys on the No Quarter, especially Tom but I think he'd had some wine by then We never really had a chance to crank them up and I didn't get to hear Jon's Ardent either RMAF left me unimpressed with the same spartan music that makes everything sound decent, but nothing really impressive. Coupled with poor room and setup it's hard to make any judegments abotu anything I heard that day, other than some speakers showed promise and a coupe were offensive, with a bunch in between that were just mediocre. The most promising designs were the JBL S9900, Revel Ultima Salon2, TAD Reference One, and the Wilson Beneasch (sp?), and speaker from a little builder called Intuative Audio. GR Research's open baffle was a little spitty, and the Audio Physic open baffle was just plain harsh. Listened to the MBL omni and once again was astounded by how that much money and engineering can result in such an offensive sound. Listened to an open baffle Lowther field coil and I still don't "get" the fullrange fascination. So pretty much a day of half starts that left me with more questions than answers.

At Tom's we only had a short time to listen to music. To be honest I've come to sort of dislike the room we have the auditions in. It seems to make everything sound small and dull. Even the NeoD, which I know certainly would not be the case in other rooms, given the drivers' dispersion characteristics. I have a particularily live room, but even speakers I've played at friends' homes has sounded much more like my room than Tom's. I wish we could use his HT room, but that has monster line arrays that just aren't feasible to move.

The DE160 is a much smoother driver than I expected. No sibilance or spittiness that some domes get when pushed even reasonably hard. I think proper aiming is going to be much more critical for soundstage and spaciousness than a conventional speaker. At my house the soundstage is pretty much the same as my Delphi's which are similar to the NeoD in using small, wide dispersion drivers. But my room is pretty reflective. I want to try the setup in the JBL trailer with the S9900 which are spaced far apart but aimed directly at the listener. Sounded like big headphones. I'd also like to cross them in front of the listener ala Geddes. Anyway I think they will require more optimizing due to teh directivity than conventional speakers.

I only heard 2 songs on the S9900 so there is no way I could speculate on tonality or response smoothness from that (compared to mine). Soundstage differences were probably mostly setup related, the JBL were widely spaced and pointed directly at the center seat, while the one hour I had the NQs running in my house I just pointed them straight forward. Still a very good soundstage and spaciousness, but as I said I have pretty refelctive room. I will say that the JBL drivers seemed very well behaved. We didn't crank them up, but there wasn't even one hint of anything offensive. Driver integration was very good, I couldn't really tell where one driver took over. I would have liked to had a lot more time with the S9900 and TAD Ref One. Under identical conditions I would imagine both would pull ahead of my speakers quite a lot, but then again they should.

BTW the TAD does seem to have done a coaxial correctly. The cone is very shallow, almost looking like a tweeter on the MCM waveguide, if the waveguide was silvery and made from Be.

I don't know about rock concert levels but they can get louder than anything I've built so far. By a large margin. In fact I don't really know how loud they will acceptably go. I played Queen's Fight From the Inside last night at 102dB (RS meter, C, slow) at the listening position (13 feet) and it was incredibly loud. Regardless of what the math may suggest, there is no way my other speakers using the Peerless Exclusive 8" would have reached levels like that. The NQ's were rocking alright...

So the hiss has been dropped to acceptable levels by switching to XLR for the tweeters, then reducing the amp's gain while raising the DCX output gain a corresponding amount. I also raised the DCX input gain.

I wanted to do some research to see how high the woofer could be run, and if there would be any improvement to the tweeter by raising its crossover point, so I modeled a 2khz crossover design also and input that into the DCX. Unfortunately in the time it takes to get up and change the DCX back and forth I pretty much forget the fine details of what I've heard so nothing to report yet. I've found there is nothing like instant switching to get an unbiased comparison of speakers so I'll try this again when I can get my laptop hooked to the DCX and can change instantly back and forth while sitting on teh couch.

BTW here are some pictures of my listening room. It has a very spacious sound but without any major defects that you might expect from it being so reflective. This room is the main reason I agree heavily with Toole. If I were to use room treatments it would be solely for frequencies below the Schroeder F, I like my reflections thank you very much I've found that I usually tip the treble down a bit from the modeled flat response in most speakers I design (which has occasionally caused issues when someone built my design or borrowed my speakers and played them in a treated or "dead-ish" room). Interestingly I've not had to do this with the NQ. They have not been tweaked from the model which was as flat a response as I could get. I think this is mostly due to its directivity.

Yeah I stored profiles in the DCX and it doesn't take but 10 seconds to get off the couch and switch. Still though 10 seconds is a long time for accurate aural memory and I prefer using some sort of instant switching whenever possible.