Islander

Didn't Tim Renwick play with Al Stewart in the 70s on Year of the Cat and maybe some other stuff?

Mike, I wanted to try one more thing before I got back to you. This morning, I moved the sub to the south wall so that it would be aimed toward the end of the room that opens toward the kitchen and dining room and did a test run. The 35 and 30Hz resonance was actually worse (I got a headache within a minute that lasted half an hour), but I was able to identify the culprit. The four-by-five-foot window above the sub was really humming loudly, so I moved the sub back to its position between the speakers. I'm not about to Dynamat one of my living room windows, so I think I'll leave everything as is. Most music sounds really good, with the exception of some bass-heavy stuff that always sounds a bit unpleasant anyway. Since the lowest note on a 4-string bass guitar is around 40Hz, there's not much music below that. The room is 18' x 19' x 8' high and opens out to 26' from the 19'. I've had the sub near the half-wall (9' wide, 8' high), near the long wall (19' x 8') between the speakers and near the short wall (18' x 8') and got the best results in the second location. I considered using my old Yamaha EQ-70 to EQ down the problem area, but then I read an article in Ultra High Fidelity that clarified the "time" thing for me. UHF, a Canadian hi-fi magazine, has been running a series of articles by Paul Bergman, who really seems to have a clue. In this month's issue (number 78), the topic is "Taming Reverberation". A quote: "In most rooms, perfectly flat response when you are seated right behind the recording console may not be so flat for the person sitting next to you, who may be the producer making the creative decisions, nor for the musician who comes and sits in the back of the control room to hear how she sounded. A second problem is that time and amplitude interact in strange ways. By "time" I mean phase, and perhaps I can best explain it this way. Let us say you measure a peak at 410 Hz. If we suppose that the speaker is without fault, then it must be the fault of the room. There is a standing wave at 410 Hz, and the acoustical energy stays around longer than it should, therefore seeming louder. However it is not truly louder. Rather, energy is being stored, and what you hear is old sound. If you EQ out the peak, you will actually have a dip at 410 Hz, which appears to be filled in by old information stored in the room." So I conclude that with the adjustments at my disposal, namely speaker and sub positioning, sub level, phase and cut-off frequency, I've got it good enough for enjoyable listening and should stop tweaking and obsessing for a bit. Thanks for taking the time to point me in the right direction. Now it's time to listen to some music!

It's not the stereo/mono thing, the earlier Beatles recordings just sound like the studio staff barely knew what they were doing, and the improvements as you listen to song after song on the One CD are very noticeable.

I'm using two Tripp Lite Isobar Ultras, one on most of the system and a second one on the sub, which is on a different circuit. They're well made, not expensive, the TV has blacker blacks and I think the FM is a little quieter, plus LPs seem to have less noise.

Call me a softie if you like, but I found this kinda moving: http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=VskbxuehP3I

Man, you weren't kidding about meter/mic position and comb filtering! I did a test run today and tried moving the meter slowly sideways a couple of feet. At 50Hz I got from 64dB to 77dB! So I did the 2-foot-wide sweep for every tone and picked the middle value. The response doesn't look so bad now. During some of the lowest tones (35Hz and 30Hz), I noticed a humming from the direction of the wall behind the sofa (on the opposite side of the room from the speakers), as a nasty peak was causing the whole room to resonate. I took a 4'x4' sheet of Cor-Plas (that plastic stuff that's just like corrugated cardboard) and leaned it against the wall in that area. It knocked 2dB off the peak, changing it from really annoying to slightly annoying. I took a look at that link you provided and it looks pretty interesting, but my computer's at the other end of the apartment, about 50 feet from the receiver. Do I have to run a lead from the meter (or a mic) to the computer and another one from the computer's sound card to an input on the receiver? I haven't listened to much music on the computer since I set up the living room system. As for hardware, I'm using a pair of La Scalas (with re-capped AA xovers and CT125 tweeters) and a Paradigm PW-2100 (10" driver and 400 watt amp). In the previous location on the short north wall, the response was smoother, but was down 16-17dB from reference level at 25Hz. I was fine with that, but now it's only down 5dB at 25Hz, so I got a bit more bottom just by moving everything to the longer west wall. Works for me.

If you want to hear an engineer's learning curve, check out One, the Beatles CD with their 27 number one hits. It goes from crappy mono to better mono, to crappy stereo, to better stereo. I hadn't listened to any old Beatles songs in a long time, and never on a fairly good stereo, and it was an eye-opener. Maybe the old stuff was mixed to sound good on a pocket transistor radio or a suitcase-style record player. That's certainly what my friends and I had back in the day.

My Yamaha RX-V750 sounds great with La Scalas.

14 gauge or 12 gauge will likely sound better than 16 gauge, especially on transients like handclaps and drumbeats. Maybe not as crucial with Klipsch speakers, due to their high sensitivity, but it was very obvious with my previous speakers.

Ah, that clears it up a bit! Thanks. I've been doing measurements using a test CD and an RS meter mounted on a tripod. I can understand frequency response, but time-domain stuff is still a bit over my head. I think I first heard of that on this forum. The sub-200Hz zone includes around 3 octaves, so I figured it was a significant part of the music spectrum, thus the time taken to try to get it straight. To show my level of ignorance, I thought a flat frequency response was the ideal situation, but some forum members seem to feel it's secondary to certain other factors. You guys are so far ahead that I'll have to get studying just to catch sight of your dust disappearing over the horizon. That's okay, I like learning new stuff. Main thing is that the system sounds great to my ears. I'm just trying to wipe a few dust spots off the sound stage.

Thanks for your response, Mike, but it's not exactly what I'm looking for. I've been shifting my speakers and sub around and trying various phase and hi-cut settings for a week (28 200Hz-20Hz runs so far) and I'm trying to decide when to quit. It's more important to please my ears than my SPL meter. Most of the changes have produced incremental improvements, like closer to reference level at 6 points, but further away at 3 other points. So I try another change and get a few more improvements. For example, moving the speakers a couple of inches further from the front wall evened things up a bit, but two more inches and eleven more inches did nothing, so I shifted them back to the "plus 2 inches" position. Luckily, the La Scalas slide around easily on the carpet, since my early models have flat bottoms. To rephrase my question, when listening to most types of music, how important are narrow peaks and dips in the bass area? Does the average note actually spread across a few frequencies, so that narrow peaks and dips are almost inaudible? Thanks in advance if you or anyone else can shed any light on this.

Check your receiver manual, but the subwoofer connection on the back of the receiver probably accepts an RCA plug. If you're using a powered sub, you'll need to put an RCA plug on the leads from the sub, keeping in mind the proper polarity of the connection, meaning positive (+) on the sub should be connected to positive on the receiver. Twisting both wires together and poking them into the receiver connection won't give you any sound, but might make some sparks. This would be a bad thing for you and your electronics.

I recently moved my speakers and furniture, in effect rotating the whole room by 90 degrees, to enable me to move the speakers further apart and have a more symmetrical layout for the surround speakers. There's been a big improvement in the soundstage and some improvement in fine detail, since the speakers are now almost 12 feet apart (center-to-center), instead of the 5 feet they had been. They're also now the same distance from the front wall (4 inches to one rear corner of the speaker, 13 inches to the other, toed in to the listening position) instead of 1 foot for one speaker and 10 feet for the other, since one was placed where the living room opens to the dining room and hallway. As well, I now have the sub between the speakers, which should be a good thing. However, the speakers' bass response is less even than it was before, and adding the sub doesn't help. Where I had one small dip and a plateau or two, I now have a three big dips and a peak that wasn't there before. Adjusting the sub's phase made some improvement, but the response curve is still kinda lumpy. My question is this: how significant are these dips and peaks? Does a single note occur at, say, 50Hz specifically, or does it sound from perhaps 40Hz to 60Hz? If the response is at reference level at 45Hz and 55Hz, but down 10dB at 50Hz, does it merit trying to get rid of the dip, or should I just ignore it unless it spreads over a 20 or 30Hz range?

especially this one http://tpluspod.com/rtl/fostex%20PVChorn.html Hmm, wonder if that guy goes to a lot of Blue Man Group shows?

No wonder I have a hard time setting up my sub!

Aftermarket networks may allow adjustment of the squawker output, but do they do anything about the harshness? I found that listening to the open K400/K55V was like watching a TV that had the contrast turned up way too high, to use a visual analogy.

I can hear a difference in my speakers with the grills off, yes. But I run the ones that have grills.....with them on....and adjust the volume accordingly. [] It's just my opinion but using layers of grill cloth to "muffle" a harsh squawker is pretty funny.....I guess whatever works for you. You can always stuff some socks in it too. [] Once again....the description of the problem is classic......and networks will correct the issue. Talk to DeanG. Then, you can go back to using just a single layer of grill coth.[] You may laugh, but it seems to work, and it cost a lot less than a new network. I may check out an upgraded network down the road, but for now the re-capped AAs seem to suit my listening situation (in terms of room size, listening distance and volume, etc.). BTW, with my previous Audio Logic speakers, I left the grilles off because the improved clarity was very noticeable.

.........The midrange was much improved......... What does that tell us about the mids? tc The mids are too harsh in stock form, to my ears, at least. The triple layer of grille cloth on the midrange horn didn't obscure the sound to any objectionable degree. It's telling that some of the aftermarket crossovers include squawker attenuators.

The grille cloth can make a big difference in the sound. When I got my La Scalas, I didn't like the sound of them. Way too "shouty" and harsh in the midrange, plus the blotchy paint on the inside of the rough-cast K-400 didn't look too good. I had the tone controls set at -4dB on treble and +0.5 dB on the bass and still wasn't happy. I picked up some stretchy black grille cloth at a car stereo shop, then applied three thicknesses to the squawker horn and a single thickness to the tweeter. The cloth was stapled to the back side of the front panel after removing the squawker and tweeter, so it looks pretty tidy. The midrange was much improved, but the tweeter sounded muffled, so I removed the cloth from the tweeter. After settling on that, I was able to set the tone controls at "bypass" and get good clear sound. Since the muffling effect is much more noticeable at the higher frequencies, I'm guessing that the notorious 9KHz "bounce" of the K-55V is pretty well eliminated, plus there's about a 3dB reduction in volume. A mechanical way to get squawker high-end rolloff! The next steps were new caps and CT125 tweeters and I'm really happy with the sound.

If you want to come as close as possible to eliminating speaker wire and all the debating that goes along with it, you need Flying Moles! Flying Mole is a Japanese company that makes very compact mono amps that are available with brackets to attach them to the outside or inside of your speaker enclosures. The 100-watt units are only $375 apiece and apparently sound pretty good. See: http://www.flyingmole.net/products/m100dcseries.html From their homepage: For Audiophiles, Hard-Core Audio Geeks and Stereo Addicts: This is the perfect amp for the high efficiency loudspeaker crowd; it was designed and voiced with such speakers in mind. In other words, think single ended triode and you will get the idea of the kind of palpable images and rich harmonic textures it generates. The amp's high resolution, speed and complete lack of grain make it an ideal match for the most revealing of electrostatic loudspeakers. If you like wall-to-wall soundstaging with finely layered depth, you will be shocked at how much of both you will get. The M100dc+'s strong Power Supply gives it some of the best bass around, so it is the perfect outboard amp for a passive subwoofer as well as bass amp for a biamped system.

Or there Heritage speakers ! Good point! I debated getting involved with someone who lives near me, as she'd been in a bitter palimony case with her ex that made the newspapers, and she got half a condo out of it. I don't want to lose one of my Scalas!

Don't laugh, but these two songs affected the direction of my life... Don't Dream It (Be It), by Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I took "Don't dream it, be it!" as my life motto and it's worked out pretty well so far. Imagination's Real, by The Kinks. That song helped inspire me to return to motorcycle racing after a six-year layoff. To my surprise, but not my imagination's, I was actually faster the second time around. More mature? No, that couldn't have been it... As for songs that take me to another place: 1983...(A Merman I Should Turn to Be), by Jimi Hendrix Tarkus, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer (it's a whole album side, but it's not at all too long) White Punks on Dope, by The Tubes. When you see the stage show that goes with it... First the stagehands assemble a really high stack of amps, then Quay Lewd (Fee Waybill as the glam-rock star in 14" platform boots) starts the song. Halfway through, he leans back against the amps, and they tumble down onto him until he's buried. Sirens go off, red lights flash, and scantily-clad nurses carry him off stage. He struggles back to his feet and resumes the song. The instrumental break in the middle is when this happens and it's a real driving refrain that is pretty exciting and stays in your mind. Yesterday on YouTube I saw Nina Hagen performing White Punks on Dope in German, although she calls it TV Glotzer. It still rocks, even without the stage show.

Installing a complete crossover, new or rebuilt, requires only a screwdriver, so you won't need to send away your speakers. If you want replace just the capacitors (or "caps"), all you need is some basic soldering skills. Since the caps are usually the only parts that deteriorate with age, that may be all you need to change. Much less expensive than replacing the whole crossover, and you will notice the improvement in the sound. I replaced the caps in my '74 La Scalas' crossovers last month with new Sonicaps from BEC (Bob Crites), another forum member, and was very pleased with the improved clarity.

Bob's Your Uncle? That would be Sook-Yin Lee, the singer of that Vancouver band. She later became a MuchMusic VJ and now does a show on CBC radio. She recently starred in Shortbus, possibly the most daring Hollywood movie in recent memory. She's still a better singer than actor. Carol Pope, of Rough Trade. Remember High School Confidential? Norah Jones, of course. Annie Lennox will always be a star.

Are you using a CD and an SPL meter to get those numbers? I'd like to find a CD with test tones that cover most of the audio range. The only one I have just covers the range from 10Hz-200Hz, which is fine for setting up the sub, but I'd like to get an in-room response curve for my speakers. Is anyone aware of a CD or DVD that has test tones (not sweeps) from 20-20KHz?