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Our venture into retirement with a Dedicated Home Theater


NBPK402

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Just got my Roxul in... They shorted me by one bundle and it was damaged. frown.gif I negotiated the price due to the damage and got it for $44 a bundle (7 bundles). They are ordering my missing bundle and hopefully I will have it by the beginning of December (orders come from Canada for the Roxul 60).

This will be for the single layer behind the screen, and also for the double layer behind the second row seating.

 

 

I also received my new Peerless rack... So over the next few days, I will be dis assembling the old rack and installing the new rack, making the frames for the wall behind the AT screen (2x4s), and then ordering the 1/2 x6 pieces for the rear wall frames. I will then be covering the wall behind the screen with Black Commando Cloth, and the rear wall with black, and, or Blue GOM.

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I see several bundles of work there.

I just moved all 7 bundles into the HT which is about 100' away through 4 doors, and it was not fun! What i would have given to be 20 years younger again! We will see how much energy I have left to work today. First thing is to take a shower to get the fibers off of me. One nice thing about Roxul is it has a fire rating of "0", and a fire spread rating of "0"... I was told that during a demo they tried to set fire to it and it would not light!

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I got the Yamaha back from the repair shop... Apparently there was a defect in the output transformers (I think that is what they called it), and they shorted out. Normally the short would have been protected from causing more damage,b b ut in my case it wasn't and they had to replace a board. They said they have only had 2 other P7000s amps ever come in, and they had the same problem as mine (just that the protection did protect it). Other than that they have seen some P5000s amps but no other Yamaha Pro amps. They said the Yamaha Pro amps last forever.

 

I worked on getting my new rack up and getting the MiniDSPs going all day yesterday. When I got everything up and running I found that I have noise coming out of my P2500s amps when I turn them on (they  had been used for my sub amps and worked flawlessly). I think it is the rca to XLR cables, as i disconnected the the RCA end from the MiniDSP, and it went silent.. I am going to head over to Guitar Center toady, and get some Vampire Wire RCA to XLR cables, and try them out. I think I also might have a bad RCA cable going out of the MiniDSP to my Topping T chip amp (or I have a bad connector on the MiniDSP), as I am getting no sound to my left horn. I tried switching the input cables to the Mini DSP and the sound moved appropriately.

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I went to Guitar Center and got some Live Wire RCA to XLRs, and then completely re wired the amps, and miniDSPs. I ended up with some noise still so I relocated my PCs and then used some Cheater plugs... Now it is very quiet.

 

I am very pleased with the way the MiniDSPs worked out as crossovers for my setup. Hopefully in the next few weeks a friend of mine will get some time to help me dial them in with REW.
 
For now i did something that came out nicely but I am sure it is not the correct way to get an active crossover up and running.
 
This is what I did...
In the past with the La Scala crossovers as a temporary crossover Audyssey would give me a 150-250hz crossover. :( I saw on line where someone made a comment that it might be doing that because the Horns were so much more efficient than the 1/4 pie bass bins, so I decided to do a little experiment.
 
First I lowered the gain going to the horns and then ran Audyssey... It moved my crossover closer to the 80hz that I felt it should be at so I continued to play with the levels until I was able to get a 80hz crossover. Once i had it to that point I maxed out my gain going to the 1/4 pies, and then slowly raised the gain on the horns, re ran Audyssey, and repeated until I got to the 80 hz goal. Then I saved it and watched some music videos, and a movie. I must say it def sounded better all around. I am sure that once we run REW it will show a lot of work still needs to be done to get it dialed in, but I believe we are closer than we were with the La Scala crossovers.
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Last night i sat down and listened to some stereo tracks... It was the first time i have listened in Bi-Amp mode  vs Audyssey. I have to say i was pleasantly surprised by the sound. The Topping T chip amps appear to be up to the task of driving the horns no problem. I listened at a fairly loud level as well as lower levels to see how they sounded... I noticed that the KPT3002, and the HIPs were noticeably brighter sounding. I actually preferred the horns in Bi-amp mode, and even tried it in direct mode (no Audyssey), and that sounded pretty good too. One track I was listening to had a little bell that is off to the right of the stage and it was projecting it to my right while i was sitting in the 2nd row! Now this would be great if my soundstage was like that for all my music, but it is not to that point yet. Tonally I much prefer the horns to my old La Scalas (which I loved). We will see what we can find out when we run REW... Once we get that far we will know what we need to do to tune the room properly (hopefully).

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Yes, Bi-Amped is a great way to go, what i really like is the fact you really dont need to run the Amp(s) very hard.

My cooling fans are thermo controlled, and they have yet to come on.

One time two days into tuning the Active Crossover, i was driving it hard, thought i was finely going to see the fans come, instead, I got my first neighbor complaint. :o  

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We def have some room tuning to do and some fine tuning of the speaker setup... I was listening to some music tonight, and i noticed that on some songs it just blared out at certain frequencies while others sounded perfect.  I believe it is in the the part from the horn but it might be at the crossover. I guess I could replay the songs that do it, and turn off the bass bins to see if it goes away or not...

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Update: I finally got around to getting REW installed and ran it for my front 3 channels. When i did this I decided to re run Audyssey, and as usual it showed all 3 front channels were out of phase. I decided to reverse the phase on the horns and see what happened. The results were better but it still didn't seem right, so I re ran Audyssey again, and it still showed out of phase! I returned the horns to their original phase, and reversed the phase on the 1/4 pies... My bass went up 5-10db!

 

Here are my REW plots for my left channel..

 

1/4 pie only....

leftbassbinwithcorrectphase_zpsf0a4c317.

 

Here is the Horn only...

lefthornwithcorrectphase_zpsb6654e05.jpg

 

Here are both together...

leftbasswithhornandcorrectphase_zpsb5ffc

 

I am tempted to raise the gain on the horns a bit to get the crossover of 500Hz to be closer to the 1/4 pies... Should I do it or just leave it as is?

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We got the front 3 channels all dialed in last night with REW, and I muxt say everything I listened to sounded great! This is what the REW looked like after fine tuning (1/6) smoothing...

 

Left JBL2360a with EV DH1A tuned with a 3.46 ms delay

111314lefthornonlytuned_zps4b7842dc.jpg

 

Left 1/4 Pie BB tuned for 500Hz crossover to horn

111314leftbbtuned_zps3742e3d2.jpg

 

Complete speaker response 

111314leftspeakertunedcomplete_zps0b78f3

 

 

All responses are from the MLP.

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Did you get some sound absorbers built and installed yet ?

I have 6 first reflection panels built so far, plus 8 bundles of R60, and R80 lining up (temporarily) behind my 2nd row of seating.

 

I am thinking i might need to boost the 150Hz , and below a little (down to 60-80Hz), and then boost my subs to get a little more of a typical house curve for movies.

 

Here are my curves...

 

Rear sub..

111314rearsub_zpsc00afcf5.jpg

 

front sub..

111314frontsub_zpsdb32c1cd.jpg

 

left channel speaker for reference..

111314leftspeakertunedcomplete_zps99c551

 

What do you think?

Edited by ellisr63
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