Any one see the Lexicon MC-12HD replacement at CES? - Page 3

Noah,

"- they're only effective around tuning."

Per their own page they offer these in 1/3 octave steps. 1/3 octave is wide to try and deal with a resonance, it is why PEQ is used not 1/3 octave EQs for room issues.

A Piano has 12 notes between 40 and 80 hz. 1/3 bandwidth means that in trying to deal with a narrow bandwidth mode you are also altering the response of at least 4 notes along with the mode.

The current Lexicon EQ can setup filters as narrow as 0.7hz. For the second octave that is basically a 1/57 octave filter. That lets you more effectively deal with the mode while having less change to the surrounding material.

Shawn

....But that's a circular layout in a rectangular (26.5 x 33) room. The closest I've seen to a sperical room was a home theatre inside a small geodesic dome someone had built on their property. The owner had posted on the old SMR Forums over a decade ago; Andre and Shawn may recall the thread.

Going back to the original question, I spoke to the Lexicon representative at CES for quite awhile. He indicated that a replacement to the MC12 is just around the corner (end of summer). He indicated that he could not disclose much information, but when asked, it will have a built in eq and dual HDMI outputs with each output having separate scaling ability. That's about all I was able to get out of him except it would cost about $15,000. No surprise there.

Built-in scaling is .

I hope there are separate HDMI receivers and transmitters per output and input.

Yes--with appropriate dither, of course. So? As long as the full resolution of the source is maintained, where's the problem?

Keen observation

Since I'm a Theta guy and the room contains a Theta Digital Casablanca and Gen VIII DACs, any time I've looking at this room my focus has always been on his equpt. list.
I think most people are just drawn to that list automatically.

...an unavoidable market requirement at this point in time.
That would be nice: with the HDMI connections always hand-shaking, switching would be as quick as it was back in the day of analogue audio/video. Don't Levinson and Lumagen already do that?

Been there. Could not find a really good seat.

Did you look in the middle of the room?

I think when Jeremy stepped out of the room to bring you a snack, you should have turned the three of em sideways and just lay down

"Don't Levinson and Lumagen already do that?"

Yes, it is nice in the Radiance. Maybe not quite as fast as analog (you still might be changing output settings based on the new input) but pretty decent. You also need multiple HDMI receivers if you are planning on allowing multiple zones to work off different HDMI inputs. In the Radiance's case this allows for PIP/POP.

Shawn

I was only referring to narrow tuning for classical diaphragm or Helmholtz resonators.

Their broadband bass absorbers work on a different principle, using pressure near boundaries to make a diaphragm push air through a lossy path.

Viscous damping is self-regulating; it's proportional to velocity, which will be much higher at modal freq.

That would be a cylindrical room.

Rectangular room (26.5 x 33), corners can be seen in the first photograph.

Well yeah, it's not really a problem. Just a discussion topic.

Probably true, but I think that's more of a checklist feature than one driven by real need. Someone just told me that their Oppo 93 has the best scaling they'd ever seen, and it saddens me when prepros include a technology that is not really in their line of expertise. Of course, I also want them to weigh less than 10 lbs and look like a computer, so I'm not their target (read "RT-20") audience.

What I would appreciate on the pass-through HDMI port is resolution independent OSD overlay.


Yeah, so it will have sinusoidal modes. Circular arrangement of speakers isn't really the relevant to the modes. The boundaries of the room --- the stuff that the sound waves bounce off --- have to be circular for the modes to change ... to something else much more difficult to analyze for most people (Bessel functions).

--Andre

Sure, same reason they included Neo:6 in the MC-12. Hopefully there will be a way to bypass the internal scaler, for folks with dedicated video processors.

Sorry, I missed that. I'm still pondering a spherical room. It's seems impractical.

Even a dome would probably focus the sound like one of those parabolic dish microphones, turning the sweet-spot into a hot-spot.

The above is about right. Listening in a room with a barrel ceiling is awful. Being inside a ball would be worse. How many real world spaces are balls? We tend to accept what we find in life. Rectangular rooms are the typical room shape so the reflections are what we are used to and sound normal to us. The also are easier to model. Rooms with strange shapes and open sides or ends are tougher to treat and live with.

Like Kal said above acoustic treating a room for modes tends to smooth the room far better for ALL seats then the EQ does for just one.Tube traps are the best I have found for doing this. Also since bass modes are the biggest offenders, to EQ well, one needs more resolution than 1/3 octive bands. 1/12th is where one should be looking to start from. If it is not there it is all but useless, IMO.

He also agreed that EQ, especially for bass, works to improve all seats as well. And in fact, that's the entire point of the JBL BassQ box.

EQs used for bass are parametric EQs, so it is not useful to talk about 1/3 octave EQs as if anyone with any sense would use them. Digital parametric EQs with 1 Hz resolution are not uncommon. The Lexicon MC-12 EQ system has a 0.7 Hz resolution. That's because bass resonances can be very narrow in terms of units of Hz, and you want to only correct that resonance without mucking up the neighboring frequencies.

That also means analysis software (the things that generate the spectrum diagrams) must use small bins so that you can see the thing you're trying to correct. That's a pretty common failing I see in many EQ systems. Even the RPG diagrams, from people who should know better, had FFT bins that were too big.

--Andre

I think anyone here believes you incorporate acoustical treatments in the room after a professional design. Then use the EQ to tweak things improving those nuance characteristics at various frequencies that acoustical treatments cannot accomplish. I don't think anyone suggested skipping the acoustical treatments in favor of EQ.

*Listening to (watching) Amy Winehouse LIVE BD now in the theater... phenomenal Blu Ray. And her perky implants make for good laughs, too.

I did not say that "the EQ does for just one;" you inferred that.

I don't believe I said that either although I implied it.

Damn, I was hoping it would come in at $10-12K. So much for the recession-based pricing some were predicting.

Someone in the BassQ thread posted an e-mail reply from Synthesis tech rep David Glass outlining how the Harman room correction system worked. It basically broke down into four steps.

The first step is to use positional EQ and SFM. The former involves placing subs for greatest seat-to-seat consistency and the latter is their Sound Field Management algorithm that adjusts the signal to each sub to further minimize seat-to-seat variance. This addresses the most common complaint about equalization: making things better in one seat can make it worse elsewhere. So even if this step didn't result in smoother and/or flatter bass (though it does as a byproduct), just getting consistency within a few dB across all seats makes it much easier to EQ the room.

Once that is done, the system can start EQing the room modes/resonances in the global subwoofer signal, paying careful attention near the crossover point. Same with the sats: while EQ'd independently, the response of the front speakers is tuned as close as possible to each other around the crossover point (even going an octave below). Finally, and all pass filter is used to make sure that everything is in phase and that the splice between the subs and sats is seamless (all that attention paid around the crossover point). Their target curve can be seen in the thread that Sean Olive started about his room correction comparo.

Andre, you may remember some of this from the slide show that Alan Devantier's gave us on the Harman tour last May, especially the part about how well they'd been able to blend the L/C/R speakers and subs (without manual intervention).

Anyway, living with room correction for the last 7 years has cured me of any notion that it is only effective for "just one" seat, though I can understand why others still cling to that belief.

The RV-5 was just a re-badge of a Harmon Kardon H/K AVR-745. The back panel and specs were identical.

Looks like Lex is trying to clear out the warehouse:

http://www.electronichouse.com/artic...When:18:47:52Z

Could be... but likely that yesterday's $11K SSP is today's $7K SSP. It is pretty clear that SSPs at the high end are suffering price envy these days. I see little value in them like I used to. New designs are pretty ideal and Lex wants to trry and compete (and clear out the warehouse.

I wonder what the SSP of their new models will be? I have to imagine a loaded Lexicon will not exceed $10K to $12K given the state of the art.

I heard $10k to $15k and the Levinson model around $20k.
Ken

That's been true for a while. It's the timing of this price drop that gives the impression they're making way for the new model.