Archaea's Kansas City Blind Subwoofer Shootout 2012 - Page 19

Carp is selling his caps in the subwoofer for sale classified on AVSForum. For those of you who liked the Captivators at the KC meet - heads up!

He was finally lured in by the siren song of the Submersive HP.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post21734084

Fair?
I offered the INuke amp, we worked to achieve a very flat response with the DSP in my room prior to the meet, you liked it better than the Dayton amp that you brought with you - and you said lets go with the INuke. Fairness doesn't really enter the equation? - It was your choice to use the amp we used. I had an EP4000 offered for use, an Inuke DSP 3000, and your Dayton SA1000 to choose from. You chose the INuke and prior to meet were very enthusiastic about that choice

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Dennis,
I've not visited CHT forum, except about 3-4 times since the meet, 1 today at Greg's mention via e-mail of more KC Sub Meet discussion being stirred up (which he states wasn't his intent at all), 1 to visit to the Crown xls-5000 thread to try figure out how to modify my XLS-5000 fan for less fan noise, and 1 visit on complete accident when I accidentally clicked a old history bookmark and immediately navigated back away!

The reason I stopped visiting? ----- The absurd way I was treated.

Craig acknowledged in the CHT thread, and that I was a good guy and a smart guybut in private it became evident through PM's and public forum discussion that he believed I intentionally or incompetently set him up to fail. Intentionally - no way. Incompetently? - perhaps - but not that I can figure. Craig's contempt for me is in complete error and Craig has to know that. If Craig doesn't believe it, then you, Dennis, because you interacted with me Friday night as we setup, Saturday at the control table, and Sunday during the retest need to inform him such. I harbored no ill will -- I'm just a subwoofer enthusiast who lost a lot of enthusiasm over the drama involved. I had nothing to prove one way or the other. I would have liked my Caps to win - they didn'tI didn't stack odds towards or against any sub in the meet.

If the expensive and highly touted Seaton and JTR subs would have been beat by the less expensive CHT or HSU subs we would have published it all still the same. Some of us would have shared a Charlie Brown good grief moment' for spending the extra coin on ID brand name alone. But that's not the way it panned out. If we held the meet again - regardless of amp I believe it'd be the same. The order of subs rating fallout really didn't hold many surprises when you consider price. It seems with subwoofers that when you pay more - you get more! Which Subs does Craig think the CHT 18.1 pair should have beat that they didn't? The only non expensive sub that beat the CHT 18.1 pair had four drivers and a much flatter EQ (DIY MFW-15 pair)

Craig should have just left the company response at We got beat by much more expensive offerings - perhaps setup could have been more ideal -- We'll try again next time. I advised him of such. Instead CHT went into massive, psychotic, damage control mode. The entire CHT thread about the KC meet thread was re-written. Posts deleted, modified, pots intents/meanings changed - and CHT fans were scared off. This is evident by many PMs I got. This chaos ended up being much worse for CHT than the vanilla meet results ever would have been.

Dennis I believe you know I was actually trying to help Craig have a good showing and he accused me of stacking the cards against him on many occasions since. He has softened the thread, but it was not always so towards some of us that organized and held the meet. I reached out to him before the meet to try to ensure we could help his subs perform at their best, he and I exchanged voicemails, pms, etc - we never actually talked at length, but it wasn't because of ill will - both of us were just busy in the couple weeks leading up to the meet. Since then he's acted like he can't get a hold of me, and I won't call him back -- even his last post in the new thread says I have his number and have never called him. What? --- he knows my number and contact information, and despite calling me before the meet he hasn't called me since the meet. Nor do I think either of us particularlly wants to talk to the other - - Heck I was registered on his forum - to say he can't contact me and I won't contact him was originally a façade. Even today he's throwing my name around saying I still won't answer questions. I tried to answer some of his questions previously --- The questions he did ask of me --- he then proceeded to delete my response on multiple occasions in his forums and then told his public I wouldn't answer the questions. Two of those examples were caught in screenprint by other forum members a few pages back in this very thread. There were more not caught by avsmembers. I tried to be very reasonable up front with Craig, and even continue that neutrality post meet amidst the chaos. My intent was to initially communicate everything through PM - - everything could have been discussed in private so he could figure out what happened and try to recreate it in his own home with his INuke DSP 3000 - but my attempt at reasonable communication was not returned. I still haven't laid all of our disagreements out because I was trying not to give him more headache. I don't need to post our PMs. There's no real point. I have no burning desire to see the CHT business fail. The funny thing is before the meet I was a CHT advocate and wanted the business to succeed! I recommended the product in several threads, and liked the value I saw and heard during the October meet in Omaha at Greg's house. I liked his CHT Sho-10's, I liked his VS 18.1 and I said so to multiple inquirers through PM. Since the meet, I don't think I can recommend the product - not because of the shortcomings of the product itself, but because of the way I was -- and continue to be treated. The thread discussion going on there today is lucrative, I'd like to respond, I'm directly invited to respond -- but once bitten, twice shy as the old saying goes. Had Greg not e-mailed me that it was going on I never would have saw it.
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Why is he is still trying to compare the pair of Submersive HPs to the pair of 18.1s based on SPL measured and wattage? He is asking why both subs hit exactly 118dB and says the HP Submersive used all collective 4800 watts to get there, -- how does he know? What proof? What frequency was the max SPL measured at? Does he even know that the 118dB number we measured in both cases was not a MAX SPL number? Those peak numbers were captured by our arbitrarily chosen audition volumes. We didn't try to get anything to 118dB. We decided to run the AVR at -10 with the subs uniformly hot (mimicking a typical enthusiasts listening experience) and let the chips fall where they may. We had no target SPL. In the same post he says his 18.1 subs only had the Inuke's paltry <700 watts to get there. I don't even know what his point is? The meet wasn't a max SPL contest! The JTR and Seaton Equipment could have got MUCH louder! Perhaps with a better amp his equipment could have preformed louder as well. Craig, (and you) seem to continue to believe it is 100% the amp fault, but based on several determining factors I won't buy that. He says asking the 18.1 pair to hit 118dB with the INuke is a physical impossibility and said they were at "100%" distortion levels at those peaks and that's the reason they were rated poorly. I challenge anyone to speak up if they heard any distortion in any of the music aside from the sine sweep? Look back through the comments - gathered at the meet - - -there is no mention of such. He states that if the subs were played at 110dB or less the scores fallout would be different from this meet. Well, he stepped in it again, because from what I remember 5 of the 7 subs finished the entire music section with no peak higher than 111-113dB during the entirety of the music section. I didn't hear any distortion in the music with the CHT product on any occassion except the first sine sweep. The two exceptions to the 111-113dB music max were the JTR 'ported' type subs (Cap pro and Orbit Shifter) which I distinctly remember finished the music section much higher peaks than the rest of the subs at 116dB. They use the same exact driver and a brief exchange with Jeff indicated that the sensitivity of these Cap drivers is much higher than the rated sensitivity as the driver plays into upper frequencies. Because the JTR driver is exceptionally sensitive at say 70hz it shows higher spl peaks even when calibrated initially to the same dB at test tones. This higher peak level for the ported JTR products was also observed during the movie section where outside of the JTR product, everything else peaked at 118 or less, and the JTR ported' type subs peaked in the low 120dBs. At any rate - these 118-123 peaks recorded for the entire audition were the highest peaks recorded and they were strictly captured during the movie section. So for the music section the CHT subs were well within the amps limits (no clip lights were every engaged during the music section as you recall during Sunday's retest - even on the sinesweep. This info flies in the face of Craig's statement that a spl max of around 110dB would have kept the CHT subs within its limits on the INuke amp and the CHT subs wouldn't have bowed out to the more expensive contenders.

As far as retesting a 3rd time in my room? It's not necessary IMO. I'm fairly confident Craig could have -(and should have) used the information I offered thrice to provide him via PM on CHT forum to exactly duplicate the bad noises on the exact same demo material we auditioned. I offered to send him the demo material on DVD/bluray, e-mail it to him, whatever. I offered to send him exact INuke DSP settings (which I ended up posting in our thread), I offered to send him omnimic graphs of all testing dates for comparison. I offered to send him Sunday's retest data before I published it in this thread so he could vette it first. To all of these offers he simply said 'Please go away'. Also curious because at this same time he is asking me to publically respond in the thread, while deleting my posts, then at the same time telling me to go away through PM. I don't think Craig was really interested in getting to the bottom of what happened. I think he already knew what was going on. Didn't Craig have a test Inuke DSP 3000 at the time of the meet? If he really suspected something was done unfairly or his product was represented unfairly wouldn't he want a copy of the demo material, the DSP and AVR settings used, the FR graphs and other various data points to try to recreate the issues in his own home? He didn't. Perhaps because he already knew to expect these results - yet to read the thread you'd think the entire world had betrayed him, and I and others sole purpose in hosting this meet was to make him fail. --------Instead of rooting out the issue, or just admitting a still honorable defeat -- he went into deranged damage control - even at the expense of long time loyal friends and customers/enthusiasts like HuskerOmaha.

I'm all for letting those 18.1's have a retest at a sub meet, but let somebody else do it in a new meet. Anything I try to do it seems Craig won't trust, and I'd wager I've already been ill-legitimized unfairly by some of the CHT board. There's far too much drama around it for me. I encourage the guys in CA with the upcoming socal subwoofer meet to integrate some CHT stuff into their meet. They should use the most powerful amp they can lay hands on to ensure the CHT gets the best possible representation. I'd truly like the CHT to be represented as strongly as is possible. Frankly if he was wronged at the KC meet - It'd behoove Craig to send equipment there for the test just like Mark sent stuff to the KC blind meet, when no owner was present to represent. If there is really nothing to fear you'd think he'd be jumping at the opportunity to showcase the product and sending it to every future enthusiast gathering even whispered about to gain press. As such the only thing I've seen is that mktheater originally was going to have a meet this month to compare CHT equipment to JTR and others at his house and that was cancelled or delayed, and Craig was going to have a battle Royale in April against all the big ID dogs that he would purchase with his own money. --- But last I saw it was moved to October and looks to be pretty much exclusively a CHT lineup at this point. If there is no real shadowy reason for these changes - it seems counter intuitive that Craig isn't ensuring his products are represented at the 3 or 4 budding subwoofer meets to ensure his subs are represented and clear his name.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - to me - the CHT 18.1 pair sounded the same on Friday Jan 13 test night, as they did on Saturday' Jan 14 meet, as they did on Sunday Jan 15 re-test. Which is especially important to this discussion. Why? I fail to see what the difference was when on Friday night during our demo session four of us (You, desertdome, kwarny, and me) heard the exact same problematic noises on the most intense scenes that we heard on Saturday during the actual meet. Finally the thing that just sticks in my mind and won't let go is that on Friday night you, Tesseract67, enthusiastically said we needed to keep everything as it was, despite my clear warnings, that the CHT subs, no matter what the cause, shouldn't be allowed to make those bad noises because they would would be the only subs making those bad noises during the meet. Yet as desertdome and kwarny will attest - you very strongly said the CHT subs sounded the best they'd ever sounded during Friday night's pre-audition, and that you were feeling low end frequencies that you'd never felt before with those subs, and that the possibility of a couple bad sounds would be outweighed by the other positive aspects of sound and depth that the INuke DSP 3000 provided. You loved the amp Friday Night before the meet - talking about even purchasing one yourself, - we used the same settings during the meet - and then upon seeing the scores you hated the amp post meet. To swing full circle -- that to me is not fair

The subs did sound a bit off for some reason in our limited tested when bridged to 4ohm. We would have liked to have more time in testing but as Dennis said - it was late - big day the next day etc. I've read in the CHT forums that members there really hate the EP4000 amp on the CHT 18.1 subs. I can't figure that one out either. The EP4000 amp should sound as good on the CHT subs as other amps? Is it a power thing? A amp rolloff (or lack thereof) thing? I really don't know.


My 'bringing it up' was legit. CHT forum brought it up today and I simply encouraged the socal subwoofer meet guys to engage CHT and either prove or disprove our testing data so it would quit being brought up. This transpired in the JTR Captivator Sealed thread. Craig should be excited to send a pair of subs there I should think!

Close carp, but not the right day.
The 18.1s sounded weak with the dayton amp on Sunday's retest. And there was some talk of worry about the dayton shutting off on friday night if used during the meet. The sound on the nuke was so good on friday night Dennis didn't even care to get out the Dayton. My question becomes if the CHT subs sound great on the dayton but poor on the inuke and poor on the well established ep4000 (accoording to several on cht forums including tesseract) perhaps it isn't that they need more power to sound their best but less?

I don't think the cht subs sound bad, I never did. They are good sounding subs. You'll never find a post or a pm from me saying otherwise. They just weren't the best subs present, and were outclassed by the much more expensive options at the audition. That's the horse pill for some to swallow.

You'll recall I liked the sound but felt very strongly and communicated such against the noises we heard at the limits on friday night.

I honestly have never thought the subs were junk. Still don't and would challenge any one who does.

Another thing I challenge is misinformation and misdirection when I encounter it in any manner. I seem to have encountered this too heavily on the cht boards first hand. I see kwarny challenged Craig on what frequencies the max spl was collected at, craig played dumb and says he thought those Spl peaks were captured a low frequencies. This is a perfect illustration. He couldn't have thought that because one of my posts he deleted said that very same idea ---that we have no idea at what frequency the clips were measured at. We used c weighting for the spl measurement peaks at our meet which focuses on tones 50hz and above. He is being deceptive again to his readers.

As to the ep4000
If I recall correctly

You told me on cht board that you didn't like the ep4000. When I asked you why, you said "use your ears man". I remember that and I remember thinking it was something I honestly didn't understand. I still don't. I haven't logged in to cht in a while but I might still have that pm. You are correct that I don't recall you saying you used it on a cht sub but given the context ---that certainly was my assumption. At that time I was trying to figure out why multiple people on the cht forums said the ep4000 was no good while people here praise it? I was evaluating a ep4000 amp purchase and use for my own use outside of cht products.

Forgive my typing this go round. I'm on my phone.