Luv_sum_Horns

LOL I can see whey she was blown away, that’s some nice hardware you got there. -bb

I've been searching for the "Sound" for a long long time. With retirement coming up I really needed to get my rear in gear. First stereo was a Kenwood KR-9600 receiver and Kenwood 777-d five way "kobuki" speakers. With the help of a Pineer graphic equalizer I pretty much shredded them. 901's and lots-o-watts after that. Shopped entirely by "specification". Did the whole 7.1 video with sound thing with conventional speakers. Uninterested. Music was there but totally uncaptivating, uninvolving. Enter PWK and a pair of kg5.2 80 dollar beaters. Bing! Hey I LIKE horns. Couldn't find anyone with a tube amp to borrow. Ordered a Yaquin MC84L 12W SET. Bing! That's the sound I've been looking for. Unfortunately the poor thing hit it's head on the way over from China and has a nervous left channel tick. They were totally willing to ship another but I decided it will make a good project amp challenge. Ended drinking some Steve Deckert kool-aid and I am now on my second Decware amp. What caught my eye there is his page describing the Torii, that instruments produce even order harmonics. So do SET amps. PP loses some, and SS produced odd order harmonics. Either way, they sound really nice and I haven't rolled any tubes yet. I guess the other important thing I learned is what loudness level I like to listen at. 75 to 85 db's is fine in my old age and what I like about the tube sound is you don't loose dynamics or imaging at lower levels. Regardless of the volume, it sounds so good that I loose hours at a time, even while trying to get chores done! -bb

Welcome to the forum and nice score. Heresys are quite versatile as far as amping goes. My '82 Heresy sound better after a Dayton 1% recap, removed the LF scratchy breakup and have a better top end than my stock Cornwall III's. They were beaters that were painted black so I stripped them and they were walnut underneath. I used an entire bottle of Elmers wood glue to reseal the cabinet seams. New speaker gasket tape from PE around drivers and horn mounts. New screws everywhere. If you don't like what you hear you can play with the autoformer connections, dampen horns and speaker baskets. Congrats on your new addiction! Tubes sound great and there is everything from DIY to spendy stuff. Heresys also like my class D amps. With a sub they are hard to beat.

Yeah, I'm experimenting with this stuff in a manual sort of way by physically aligning components by calibrated eyeball and help from a laser level. Cornwalls on their side, with a 2" Eminence mounted to a Selenium bi-radial sitting on top, centered. The tweeter is a B&C DEC120 with that crazy FaitalPRO elliptical (it's the 80x70) on a speaker stand, a piece of 2x4 and lots of speaker gasket tape. I use the Cornwall crossover and the unbridged woofer posts to connect a 100W class D. All of you guys with the nice custom crossovers please cover your eyes because you're not going to like this part: I was anxious to hear the new stuff, and not having the ability to build a crossover, I bought a Dayton 800/5.2K 3-way. So the new top end is connected to that and my 6 watt tube amp. Ghetto setup for sure, but hey - I'm single. So yes, the flying tweeter is up in the air to clear the mid horn which, when physically aligned with the woofer hangs off the front of the Cornwall by quite a bit. I get to play with toe in for each speaker. I have a bag of Mills 1 percent resistors to pad the mid and tweet down to the woofer sensitivity, but to be honest these horns sound incredible at their stock output levels (mid is 110db, tweet 106), seems to smooth out some of the direct radiated bass. I'm amazed at your ability to analyse and "debug" your FLACs. I've always had Ardour installed as I'd need it at some point (got lots of vinyl). but your step by step allowed me to play with this stuff. What amazed me was just how poorly mastered some of my music is. Well no wonder it sound like a$$, it's a complete solid bar from top to bottom. I see you are remastering some of your stuff track by track. Have you automated this process as it seems to be quite time consuming to figure what is required to re-equalize. I ended up making a "house curve" that puts stuff where I like it. Hat's off to you, as one can make something that sounds terrible and make it passable. I can hear the DR improvements on well mastered rips. Just gonna have to retire to get the time. I tried all of the multi-channel audio and video stuff but it's just not my bag. Two channel large format horns for me!

Thanks for the reply Chris and I agree it is audible when you hit alignment, as the sound image comes into focus. I guess PWK's opinion was from the perspective of the guy that had to mount stuff into a box, make it look good, and be able to sell them. I seem to have achieved basic alignment manually with a frankenwall setup and a laser level. The EV DC One appears to function fully from the front panel so I guess that's it for me, as you can see from my avatar, I just can't run windows here. Unfortunately I'm maxed out on AC connectivity so no rack-o-converters either. All my tube amps have consumer connectors. Do you have any thoughts regarding alignment in the vertical plane as I might play with a "flying" tweeter. I'm guessing if you center the dispersion angle of each horn at face level, its going to sound pretty good. BTW, thank you for the Missing Octave thread. Awesome stuff there and a good six months of playing with my flacs! -bb

A big thanks here to Chris A. and participants in this thread for expending the funds, energy, and time to document and explain how to get around the issue of time delay. Interestingly, I was reading Dr. Klipschs' Dope from Hope Volume 13, No. 3, in answering a question (2) regarding phase shift in amplifiers said "In 1972 I presented a paper "Delay Effects in Loudspeakers". Time Delay and "Phase" are one and the same. You can move your head a foot and change the "phase" of a 6500 HZ tone a matter of 2160 degrees. The delay is only 0.0009 second. The fact that speaker displacements in a 2-way and 3-way systems of up to 2 feet are undetected should indicate in insignificance of the delay effect as long as it is within the 2 foot limit. As a matter of fact our experiments here indicate the limits may be of the order of 4 feet or nearly 0.004 second." Ok, so it seems he was saying that as long as your woofer, mid, and tweeters are within 2-4 feet of each other you're good to go. Or am I reading that completely wrong? A couple of questions for the active crossover pros: 1) Do all of you have professional equipment or are you running a rack full of balanced to unbalanced converters? 2) Most of the nice system processors have software that runs on a PC. They (all) fail to mention what operating system is required. I already know the answer is Windows. Here is the question, has anyone come across processor software that runs in a browser? Once again, thanks to all and have a great weekend! -bb

Dennie, Check out american builders, there is some really good stuff out there. I bought a cheap chinese tube amp just to see if I liked tubes, and it sounds great except when the left channel is ticking (QC issue). This prompted me to research higher quality stuff such as Amps & Sound, Wright Audio, and Decware.