Oops I forgot to mention my system is sounding freaking amazing. About the only thing my old speakers did better were the midrange and top end loudness when I turned the volume up to 11 - though that would come at the expense of the bottom end and random vibrations and resonances anyway so wasn't an overall win. The last thing I need is to listen too often at 11 anyway since I need to preserve whatever hearing I have left. Much to my chagrin(?), the speaker cables most definitely are sounding different after being burnt in, or my ears have accustomed to them or whatever. The top end has opened right up and the midrange even has more bloom now. Real win.

 

I don't know if I mentioned that when Kevin of Class A dropped off my subwoofers that we got into an argument because he was trying hard to sell me power cables, and Siltech at that... Just a reminder that they're the ones responsible for this abomination: https://www.thecableco.com/cables/power-cables/triple-crown-power-cord.html

 That’s a good result. I can’t even listen to my little Weston at the moment -  my room has 3  glass walls and no roof insulation. It’s brain melting.

But surely, Con - as you've taken the load off the 250SEs by bi-amping - with the new Nc2K monoblocs on the bass drivers - you don't need any more power for the tweeters?

 

Andy

 

25 minutes ago, andyr said:

But surely, Con - as you've taken the load off the 250SEs by bi-amping - with the new Nc2K monoblocs on the bass drivers - you don't need any more power for the tweeters?

I just said my old speakers were louder at 11. Can't have that when there's a solution.

2 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

I just said my old speakers were louder at 11.

Can't have that when there's a solution.

I suppose not, though at this rate you'll be soon running out of headroom ...on your original budget

😃😃

2 hours ago, Ittaku said:

I don't know if I mentioned that when Kevin of Class A dropped off my subwoofers that we got into an argument because he was trying hard to sell me power cables, and Siltech at that... Just a reminder that they're the ones responsible for this abomination: https://www.thecableco.com/cables/power-cables/triple-crown-power-cord.html

 

OMG, you turned down the opportunity to have 2 triple crown cords on your subs. Did he offer to demo them and show you how good they are?

I played with some DI boxes to the subwoofers today, curious about the effect increasing the input impedance would have on frequency response out of the preamp, and whether it was worth it for the relative loss of gain. (DI boxes for the reference are used for impedance matching in pro audio gear, allowing guitars and the like to see a higher impedance they otherwise might see, and output at a lower impedance, but at the cost of lost gain). The ones I tried were the Radial ProDI which have an input impedance of 130k and a wide frequency response. As the subwoofers have 20k input impedance, the overall impedance my preamp is seeing is probably around the 15k mark, when the manufacturer recommends no less than 20k (this is because I have three devices in parallel on its output - two power amps and a subwoofer). Adding the DI box to the subwoofers would more than double the impedance seen by the preamp. They decreased gain by 25dB which is a little more than I was expecting, and turning gain up to maximum on the subwoofers wasn't enough to offset it as it was still 15dB down from where I wanted it.  But the most important part was to see what effect it had on the overall frequency response - it was virtually unchanged for the non-subwoofer components, and in fact 2dB quieter because of the changed impedance. So overall it was a lose-lose situation. Ultimately seeing a slightly lower impedance than the manufacturer's recommended level is pretty much harmless, especially since I do room correction and get whatever frequency response I want. The preamp has 600 ohm output impedance, so the 20k minimum input impedance recommendation is very conservative.

Edited January 5, 20224 yr by Ittaku

Did you have a look at this sub before buying the Paradigm’s? You may not get it in your room though. 😃

 

https://www.heynowhifi.com.au/collections/subwoofers/products/ascendo-smsg50-active-seismic-50-inch-infrasonic-subwoofer

Edited January 5, 20224 yr by Pops110

5 minutes ago, Pops110 said:

Did you have a look at this sub before buying the Paradigm’s? You may not get it in your room though. 😃

 

https://www.heynowhifi.com.au/collections/subwoofers/products/ascendo-smsg50-active-seismic-50-inch-infrasonic-subwoofer

Haha no. I'd have to dig a trench into my basement to get it in there. Besides, two subs give a more even response, and the horizontally opposed drivers in mine make for exceptionally low distortion. That thing is for... recreating F18s up close maybe?

17 hours ago, Ittaku said:

That thing is for... recreating F18s up close maybe?

 Or maybe to reproduce the elusive "brown note"

I'd been haunted by this track from hearing it as the first track I heard from the Apogee Duettas the first time >30 years ago at a hifi show and yet never once thought to listen to it. I thought about it the other day and realised that thanks to the magic of Roon + Qobuz it would be easy enough to do. Amusingly there are 14 different versions of it available on Qobuz, but the original is the one I remember. It's electronica + voice and sound effects mostly but is haunting and when rendered well is quite something to listen to suspended sweetly in space. I do feel I've been able to finally surpass my distant memory of what it sounded like through those magic speakers at last. I can finally put that memory to rest.

Edited January 6, 20224 yr by Ittaku

Laurie Anderson is terrific - I have that CD but haven’t listened to it for years. I’ll rip it and have a listen tomorrow 

To redeem myself from that earlier terrible sounding video of the MBLs when they first went into place, here is a hybrid video + audio recording done with the miniDSP EARS meaning this is an actual binaural recording so it's designed to be listened to with headphones. Bear in mind the room treatment still isn't in but I've thrown pillows and bean bags strategically around the room.  This is also after the subwoofers have gone in, tone has been balanced, and room correction applied. The Select DAC is still a week away, room treatment at least two.

 

 

That’s an interesting experiment!

 

The track sounded fine to me on first listen from Youtube through my own system (not headphones). There was no depth layering in the soundstage though, all of the music came from the default plane that all sound in my system comes from that isn’t recorded (or manipulated) in any particular way to capture different depth locations of instruments and voices – about 1-2m behind the speakers (towards the front wall). I could hear and feel a tremendous amount of deep bass that my puny 10” sub was trying its best to convey. The female voice was beautifully rendered.

 

Listening to the same track from Qobuz shortly after, it revealed a quite interesting (if artificial) sound stage and depth, with several depth layers and some sounds coming from right beside me, even behind me (in a few places throughout the song, but easily found during the fade-out). I believe that hearing these things and some of the other effects in the track requires a pair of speakers that can reproduce them and an actual head with ears to receive them. They would almost certainly get lost during a microphone recording of the sound as it comes from two speakers, as opposed to sound that comes from instruments and voices scattered across a stage (or carefully placed on a virtual stage through the wonders of sound editing). I’m not even sure an artificial head recording device would be able to capture this during speaker playback, unless it was made very realistically and included shoulders (as alluded by JJ Johnston of DTS Inc).

 

I like the album, BTW, Yello hadn’t been on my radar at all so far. Added to “my albums” in Qobuz

 

33 minutes ago, Steffen said:

That’s an interesting experiment!

 

The track sounded fine to me on first listen from Youtube through my own system (not headphones). There was no depth layering in the soundstage though, all of the music came from the default plane that all sound in my system comes from that isn’t recorded (or manipulated) in any particular way to capture different depth locations of instruments and voices – about 1-2m behind the speakers (towards the front wall). I could hear and feel a tremendous amount of deep bass that my puny 10” sub was trying its best to convey. The female voice was beautifully rendered.

 

Listening to the same track from Qobuz shortly after, it revealed a quite interesting (if artificial) sound stage and depth, with several depth layers and some sounds coming from right beside me, even behind me (in a few places throughout the song, but easily found during the fade-out). I believe that hearing these things and some of the other effects in the track requires a pair of speakers that can reproduce them and an actual head with ears to receive them. They would almost certainly get lost during a microphone recording of the sound as it comes from two speakers, as opposed to sound that comes from instruments and voices scattered across a stage (or carefully placed on a virtual stage through the wonders of sound editing). I’m not even sure an artificial head recording device would be able to capture this during speaker playback, unless it was made very realistically and included shoulders (as alluded by JJ Johnston of DTS Inc).

 

I like the album, BTW, Yello hadn’t been on my radar at all so far. Added to “my albums” in Qobuz

Thanks, I had a listen through my headphones as well. It does a reasonable job of capturing the tonality of the system but emphasises the high treble and slightly diminishes the bass more than the real thing due to the microphone's intrinsic sensitivity there, but also  flattens the soundstage completely compared to listening to the real thing. The EARS are just ears, no head, no shoulders so not real binaural recordings. Nonetheless with the Mic positions being where there are it is far better trying to listen to it through headphones than through yet another speaker and room combination. That album I was introduced to recently when I went to Nirvana to listen to the Alsyvoxes and got quite enamoured with it myself too

Been trying to fine tune the phase of the subs to match the mains better, but it's been incredibly frustrating since the phase dial seems to do almost nothing till it's at around 150 and then suddenly has abrupt phase changes till 180. There's no rhyme nor reason to the scale of the phase and the manual has basically nothing to say about how the dial is meant to scale. That's one thing I miss about the SVS subs - the bluetooth app control which allowed me to set the phase exactly.

32 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

Been trying to fine tune the phase of the subs to match the mains better, but it's been incredibly frustrating since the phase dial seems to do almost nothing till it's at around 150 and then suddenly has abrupt phase changes till 180. There's no rhyme nor reason to the scale of the phase and the manual has basically nothing to say about how the dial is meant to scale. That's one thing I miss about the SVS subs - the bluetooth app control which allowed me to set the phase exactly.

On my own quite lowly paradigm subs, I decided the scale was logarithmic😃 just not sure of the number base though😕

Just now, tripitaka said:

On my own quite lowly paradigm subs, I decided the scale was logarithmic😃 just not sure of the number base though😕

Good(!??) to see it's not just me. It's night on useless like that.

Running the mains out of phase and the subs at zero degrees gave a completely different response to running the mains in phase and the subs at 180 degrees. It seems clear to me that the phase dial is completely unreliable, and probably doesn't even get up to 180 degrees. I seem to get about 100 degrees tops out of the dial. Meh.

1 hour ago, Ittaku said:

Running the mains out of phase and the subs at zero degrees gave a completely different response to running the mains in phase and the subs at 180 degrees. It seems clear to me that the phase dial is completely unreliable, and probably doesn't even get up to 180 degrees. I seem to get about 100 degrees tops out of the dial. Meh.

 

That is totally bizarre!  

 

What does it sound like, running the mains in phase and the subs at zero degrees?

 

Andy

 

1 hour ago, andyr said:

That is totally bizarre!  

 

What does it sound like, running the mains in phase and the subs at zero degrees?

The bandpass ports on the mains' woofers introduce interesting phase shifts which is why I wanted to attempt all combinations of aligned phase or aligned phase slopes at crossover points. I don't get to try mains in phase and the subs set to >120 degrees to be certain but the best response so far is with the mains out of phase and the subs at zero degrees, so it's workable. Retuning the convolution DSP at this new setting has further improved bass definition (not surprisingly) so it's been a win.

I can invert the phase on the preamp to get it back to in phase on the main speakers, but I've never been one to clearly hear a difference. Maybe we can do some testing next GTG.

6 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

Retuning the convolution DSP at this new setting has further improved bass definition (not surprisingly) so it's been a win.

 

Excellente!  

 

6 minutes ago, Ittaku said:

I can invert the phase on the preamp to get it back to in phase on the main speakers, but I've never been one to clearly hear a difference. Maybe we can do some testing next GTG.

 

Yes, in-phase vs. reversed-phase spkrs is a difficult comparison.  That would be an interesting test.  

 

Andy

 

3 hours ago, Ittaku said:

It seems clear to me that the phase dial is completely unreliable, and probably doesn't even get up to 180 degrees. I seem to get about 100 degrees tops out of the dial. Meh.

Wow, thats very disappointing. You shouldnt have to work around like that at that price point

1 minute ago, frednork said:

Wow, thats very disappointing. You shouldnt have to work around like that at that price point

Yeah I'm more than a little disappointed.

Here is a rare unboxing for your hifi porn.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's a fully loaded three box affair - separate power supplies for the digital and analogue sections, 33fs clock, and upgraded "preamp output' section. Yes I am using a separate active preamp as well, but there is no digital volume attenuation at all with that module, and the overall output impedance is lower on the DAC despite having nothing after the discrete DA modules going straight to the analogue outputs, which this DAC boasts (and R2R at that.)

 

Pay close attention to the power supply images in their boxes to see the included power supply cables...