KC High End Subwoofer Blind Audition Interest Thread - Page 6

Nobody has updated/confirmed attendance to me directly, except for listeners. I'll update the first post with confirmed attendees.

Jeff has mentioned bringing multiple products in. On the JTR Speaker forum he confirmed he'll be bringing the sealed caps the meet. I've got my Cap Pro ported pair - so there will be at least those two representing JTR.
http://jtrspeakers.websitetoolbox.co...400?trail=15#7

Sounds like we'll have some Chase Home Theater equipment brought in by owners - at least a couple of sealed 18.1's or 18.2's depending on who shows. Maybe more types -- unsure.

I haven't had the Elemental Designs options yet confirmed by Alex - but we'd be glad to have them here too.

I haven't had the submersives' attendance confirmed by counsil. I sure hope we have a couple of them entered. Mark's chimed in the thread a couple times, but no confirmation on the submersive's attendance yet.

I've had a hodge podge of individual subs offered as singles for demos - but I still want to use doubles for every single thing we listen to - to keep the playing field level and the listening area response smooth. I also want to limit this audition to the top tier subs if you will - so that we don't run out of time. I took Friday off and can also have Sunday free, and Monday is a holiday --- so I've got a lot of time. If we want to audition more subs we can if we want to make it a two day we can -- but I think our Saturday will be full with six blind sub auditions at most.
My room really likes doubles. Luke and I got the Caps to downright impressive smooth FR with the omnimic on his last visit. We found the natural sweet spot in the room and figured out the optimal facing direction. We can likely use this spot and this direction for all subs at the meet.

I would also recommend we have a couple subs hooked up before we ever start the blind judging to listen to the demo material on - NOT included in the blind audition rankings - but simply to get a feel for what to expect sound wise in my room before we ever begin the blind auditions. At the Husker Omaha meet we just listened to the first subs blind - no knowing what the room sounded like at all. For this task I'd like a couple of high quality, well known subs. A pair of SVS PB12+ or a pair of HSU VTF-15H (luke?) for instance. The subs will give the first blind audition more relevance and accuracy in the voting. Otherwise no one knows how to vote the first blind subs' audition because they don't know how the room sounds or what they should expect.

This weekend I'll post some graphs of my room.

The question I have is how much could the caps blur the lines between themselves and sealed in a 15hz tune mode? That hasn't been tested yet either.

nezff - you oughta do a road trip.





By the way - - - - anything rivaling these caps -- I've still yet to see. :P My daughter likes to dance - and by that she means running around with the music cranked. I kept inching it up on a particularly fun song and got to reference on some dubstep. My wife came down and scolded me so I turned it down to -20 again. My 2.5 year old daughter immediately started yelling


"Turn it up - Turn it up Daddy! - Turn it up! Turn it up Daddy!"

I snuck the volume back up to -15.

Now she's asking me to "come sing right now!"

Captivators and 2.5 year old daughers are both epic fun!

I'm really am going to enjoy ribbing you -- after you decide you like the ported sound better at the January meet.

I do note you put a little question mark by your title now

Anti-Ported?

getting nervous?

And here lies the difficulty. With the exception of WOTW, which somebody else mentioned you just listed off nearly the complete list of movies with < 10-15hz content. Hundreds of thousands of movies exist and we have only about a dozen which produce quality ultra low frequencies -- these have become the right of passage for demo auditions. It's an interesting conundrum. Which type of demo material better represents common use? That said - I do fully intend to include clips with the ULF as that is always hot topic. I too do want to hear what everybody keeps praising (as so far I don't think I've experienced it) - as well as see if that praise is still present in blind auditions when the auditioners don't know if they should be actually hearing it at that moment or not? - - - I also want to have clips that just sound fun for the sake of sounding fun. The clip list is not finalized yet, and I'm definately looking for input, but who doesn't like the footsteps from Jurrassic Park's T-rex? or the minigun and grenade bursts from the Terminator 2 Cybertech Office minigun scene? If a blind test is to be preformed - I think it needs to be a quality mix of all kinds of bass scenes. Also we've decided the clips should be relatively fewer than past meets and perhaps have more variance. Just listening to explosions rumble over and over through various scenes in many different movies may not be the best material to audition a subs prowness through the entire subwoofer frequency range. The Omaha meet had too many explosion rumble scenes - but it also had some awesome full spectrum bass scenes like the Bumblebee highway scene from Terminiator 3 with descending bass notes, and the Battlefield LA scene which had alien ship popping thruster sounds which were excellent. I'll likely take a couple of the favorites from each recent meet, combine them and then add a couple new clips for good measure.

- lets find a good mix of material! One or two representatives of the same kind of sound from different demo material is probably sufficient.

For those actually bringing their subs to audition, like we did in the KC meet, I'd like you to suggest one track of each music and movie to audition the subs with. Other attendees can make suggestions as well, and we'll review them all.

I've been playing around with the Behringer Inuke DSP3000.

I think I've got a darn flat graph at his point --

Check this out. --- and no smoothing. My room CAN be tamed!. The 100hz to 20hz dropping sound wave has never sounded smoother in my room. This is not Audyssey - just the Inuke DSP with 6 bands of Parametic EQ applied and a HPF set at 20hz. I can't quite get rid of the little bump at 20hz, if I put a PEQ band at 20hz above about -1dB it lowers the FR below flat there, and if I take off the HPF at 20hz I get a big bump around 20hz (subs tuning).



Here is the same graph with 1/6 octave smoothing - which is the default for the omnimic.


Here are my Parametric EQ and HPF settings on the INuke.





I'm excited about this because this new placement with the subs facing out towards the side walls that Luke and I discovered with the omnimic last week really allows for no major nulls or peaks compared to the previous manner of facing forward. I miss my ported air blowing on my face, but for the sake of our blind audition you wouldn't want that I suppose. So my room seems to be defeated with this particular sub placement and some EQ! It'll also be easy to hide the subs in this location behind a blind. If curious -look at the pictures of my room in my signature and then just imagine the subs turned perpendicular to your view - left sub facing the left wall about 2 inches from the front wall, and right sub facing the right wall.

For comparison here are some screenies from the Husker Omaha meet of the Caps and Submersive with 1/48th smoothing on. My graph above has no smoothing.

Scuba Steve also advised me on using TSMuxor and DVD-FAB to create my own demo clips. I've been playing around with that tonight and managed to successfully create a clip of Titan AE's Icefield on the Home Theatre PC. I bought a Blu-Ray drive, so I can now create any clip I want from any DVD or Blu-Ray for the meet.

The one hold up I'm still researching is that the current generation of sound cards - even nice ones like Creative Lab Fatality or Audigy cards don't support the new Dolby Digital True HD or DTS Master Audio. They only support the lossey standard version of Dolby Digital and DTS. This isn't really a problem for DVD cuts because they don't have the new standards, but for BluRay cuts - if you want lossless we'll just have to use the ScubaSteve Demo disks probably. I've got more to learn here and may not be entirely accurate in this understanding - but feel free to let me know if I'm missing something!