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Cornscala - Support with Harshness and Placement


Gints

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Well I've put down a moving blanket to simulate a rug, also put some dense felt materials at the mouth edge. Have also ordered some reticulated foam to fiddle with. Working on the wife for accoustic panels.

 

I've just listened to Sufjan Stevens live, and it felt like being back at the concert in 2016. Amazing.

 

Not sure if adapting, the treatments, or some placebo optimism, but I'm starting to get these speakers.

 

Time to return to REM for that comparison.

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Gints said:

Well I've put down a moving blanket to simulate a rug, also put some dense felt materials at the mouth edge. Have also ordered some reticulated foam to fiddle with. Working on the wife for accoustic panels.

 

I've just listened to Sufjan Stevens live, and it felt like being back at the concert in 2016. Amazing.

 

Not sure if adapting, the treatments, or some placebo optimism, but I'm starting to get these speakers.

 

Time to return to REM for that comparison.

 

 

No placebo effect.  You are heading in the right direction.  These small tweaks will make a significant difference.

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I’m getting there and soon will get my foam to test out.

 

Another thing I have noticed is not huge bass. I don’t want a droney sounds, but sometimes in rock music I feel like the mid sounds harsher because bass is not quite there enough to balance the mix.

 

The speakers have 2 front ports below the woofer. They are quite heavily padded with white foam (which I cant remove because these things are currently sealed up like Fort Knox).

 

Any feedback on what to expect from Cornscala bass? It’s not bad, but could be bigger.

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2 hours ago, Gints said:

Another thing I have noticed is not huge bass. I don’t want a droney sounds, but sometimes in rock music I feel like the mid sounds harsher because bass is not quite there enough to balance the mix.

So you're apparently thinking that the bass hasn't been arbitrarily attenuated on the recordings in order to make the recordings sound "louder". 

 

I recommend taking a look at the music tracks where you feel that it sounds bass shy.  I think that you'll find that it isn't the room or the loudspeakers...

 

 

Chris

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I have Cornscala "D's" and could not be happier there was some harshness from the compression driver when I first fired them up.

So much so that I put foam plugs in the throat of the horn.

 

After a few days I removed the plugs and all traces of harshness was gone.  It just needed some bedding in. In fact these are the least harsh sounding speakers I have ever owned apart for my Vandersteen 2CE signatures.

The bass is great, tight detailed and deep,  it thumps you in the chest.  The bass is as close if not better in some respects to a Friends Sonus Faber Amati Homage, which was a $20,000 speaker in it's day.

My cabinets have absolutely no padding at all.

I did not use the Crites Bass driver in my build, I used the Faital Pro 15pr400 instead Crossover was stock Crites.  

 

I know I am talking about the two way, as I have never heard a three way, which by all accounts sound very similar.

My room is full of stuff, I have no problems with bass boom or reflections. It has a suspended wooden floor, one long brick wall, the rest is dry wall.

I do have the speakers sitting on 1 and a half inch thick full size granite plinths, I also used 1 inch ply for the build instead of 3/4 inch. also put a three inch ply bass on the speakers.

 

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 8/8/2018 at 5:52 AM, oros said:

I have Cornscala "D's" and could not be happier there was some harshness from the compression driver when I first fired them up.

So much so that I put foam plugs in the throat of the horn.

 

After a few days I removed the plugs and all traces of harshness was gone.  It just needed some bedding in. In fact these are the least harsh sounding speakers I have ever owned apart for my Vandersteen 2CE signatures.

The bass is great, tight detailed and deep,  it thumps you in the chest.  The bass is as close if not better in some respects to a Friends Sonus Faber Amati Homage, which was a $20,000 speaker in it's day.

My cabinets have absolutely no padding at all.

I did not use the Crites Bass driver in my build, I used the Faital Pro 15pr400 instead Crossover was stock Crites.  

 

I know I am talking about the two way, as I have never heard a three way, which by all accounts sound very similar.

My room is full of stuff, I have no problems with bass boom or reflections. It has a suspended wooden floor, one long brick wall, the rest is dry wall.

I do have the speakers sitting on 1 and a half inch thick full size granite plinths, I also used 1 inch ply for the build instead of 3/4 inch. also put a three inch ply bass on the speakers.

 

 

 

This is interesting. I am progressing slowly on treatments...my urgency compared to first post has dropped.

 

What do you mean by bedding in? I feel the same way, but I assume it is just me adjusting and getting used to the sound. Can speakers actually change?

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4 minutes ago, Gints said:

Can speakers actually change?

In the first few hours of operation, the surrounds and spiders on woofers loosen up measurably.  Compression drivers also loosen up as evidenced by dropping resonant frequency.  You can actually hear these changes over time.  Note that it's an exponential phenomenon, so the changes pretty much are complete after a week of ownership and use.  After that, the changes are minimal.

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There was a marked difference in the sound of the compression driver after some use,  it was not just a matter of just getting used to it. It was honking before bedding in.

 

Ruchard Vandersteen  who by all accounts knows what he is doing, recommends that the 2CE speaker requires a hundred hours of playing to sound at his best. This man does btw, not talk or tolerate any argie bargie, he is also fully qualified to wear the PWK Bull s#!T button. I know I bought a new pair he is quite correct. I still hang on to them, cant seem to bring myself to part with them.

I will gladly take the word of a brilliant speaker designer over any other opinion.  He has like PWK never made a bad sounding speaker.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Okay hopefully get the rug tomorrow. Will then aim for some sidewall and front wall (between speakers) dampening to cull reflections.

 

I have come to realise that alot of what I am battling is also poor source music. I have some Jazz and Fusion LPs that just sound off the planet - quiet, loud, dynamic, sweet, just like a top-flight group in the same room. I had a mate come over who has $25k+ system, and he was just completely blown away by what he was hearing.

 

I then go back to my normal music (alternative rock, indie rock, prog metal) and it sounds poor. I thought my system could not handle 'busy' music (alot going on), but what I am starting to realise is that it cannot handle heavily compressed music - it comes out mushy and indistinguished. I listened to Purple by Baroness, one of my fave albums of the last few years, and it was both mushy and painfully piercing. It also has a Dynamic Range of 4. Can this compression also make the high guitars sound shrill and piercing?

 

Any way to hide this sounds? I can listen to the same album of headphones or in my car and enjoy it...but on these Cornscalas... it is pretty average.

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47 minutes ago, Gints said:

I listened to Purple by Baroness, one of my fave albums of the last few years, and it was both mushy and painfully piercing. It also has a Dynamic Range of 4. Can this compression also make the high guitars sound shrill and piercing?

 

Any way to hide this sounds?

I managed to download a cut off of the album you quoted above (Baroness's Purple).  It has several dB of clipping--about 3 dB or half the waveform--that's almost continuous.  You're going to experience harsh high frequency clipping-induced harmonics throughout most of the track because of that.  In addition, it has about 9 dB of high frequency boost around 2 kHz and midbass boost around 180 Hz that's going to make listening to the track fatiguing on any good pair of loudspeakers that have flat on-axis frequency response--like your CornScalas. 

 

You could try to run Clip Fix on these tracks using Audacity, then Normalize to reconstruct the clipped peaks, but the harsh 2 kHz mastering EQ is going to remain.  You could re-EQ the track after fixing the clipped peaks and have something that wouldn't have fangs in it. There is a vinyl version of the album that cannot have the clipped peaks (see http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/101870)--but the 2 kHz and 180 Hz EQ peaks will still be there.

 

Perhaps you've got a music problem instead of a loudspeaker-room acoustics problem.  You wouldn't be the first.  I recommend demastering your "sludge metal" albums.

 

Chris

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22 minutes ago, Chris A said:

Perhaps you've got a music problem instead of a loudspeaker-room acoustics problem.  You wouldn't be the first.  I recommend demastering your "sludge metal" albums.

 

Chris

 

Yeah Chris I'm thinking that is correct. With the right music, this setup is just out of this world by my standards. Damn my appreciation of poorly produced alt-rock!

 

I'll still do some light room treatments for help across the board - but it seems the songs that truly disappoint me are those that are pretty messed up to begin with.

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The problem with really good horn speakers is they can show any and every fault in the medium. Music that is barely tolerable on my LaScala's can sound just fine on conventional speakers. Details are lost on conventional speakers when compared to horns. I recently played with some fullrange speakers in an open baffle setup with them being easy to A/B against my LaScala's and found a lot of detail lost in the music. The fullrange speakers did sound good, a friend of mine preferred them over my horns, but not me. Dull and lifeless is my description with much less live sound and very limited dynamics . They are now retired on a self.  If the majority of you music sounds just fine chalk it up as the source and not your setup. Your room is too hard and does need some help but congratulation on converting over to horns. One thing I would do if the harshness is just too much is pad down the drivers some. Amazing what a little attenuation can do to soften the and smooth out the sound. A few db's attenuation on the drivers can and does help a lot with a too bright speaker. I speak from experience with many hours playing with crossovers and attenuation. Some do it with expensive caps that in reality just roll of the highs.

 

I really like your equipment and setup and you also you being a diy'er. I have not found the Schiit Bifrost multibit to be harsh. I really like the one I have in my room in my setup. One possible explanation why joessportster found it to be not to his liking is he did not give it enough time to settle in. Some equipment does need some hours on them before they settle down and sound like they are supposed to. Another explanation is it just not fit in with the rest of his equipment. I have never heard of any product that fit everyone's taste.

 

The brains of a speaker system is the crossover. From what I have seen of the crossover used by Bob in Cornscala's it is a simple 1st order one. It is made as a one size fits all with attenuation provided by a non adjustable autotransformer and that is not going to be the best for every room. You can spend lots of money making your room fit your crossover or you can just use 2 resistors or some L-pads for a few db's attenuation per channel on both drivers to tailor the sound for it's environment.

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48 minutes ago, wdecho said:

The problem with really good horn speakers is they can show any and every fault in the medium. Music that is barely tolerable on my LaScala's can sound just fine on conventional speakers. Details are lost on conventional speakers when compared to horns. I recently played with some fullrange speakers in an open baffle setup with them being easy to A/B against my LaScala's and found a lot of detail lost in the music. The fullrange speakers did sound good, a friend of mine preferred them over my horns, but not me. Dull and lifeless is my description with much less live sound and very limited dynamics .

 

There is a tendency to blame really good loudspeakers for their lack of distortion, which is basically what is being discussed in above.  That has always seemed really odd to me.  The majority of the difference that is measurable between horns and direct radiators is a specific type of distortion: modulation. 

 

While there are measurement rigs and procedures to measure this, almost no loudspeaker manufacturer reports modulation distortion figures for their loudspeakers, and currently the prices of the IEC 60268 measurement rigs (notably made by Kippel) are in the $10,000+ range. 

 

I'm still waiting for a DIY measurement solution--like from REW--to run a series of dual tone measurements to plot modulation distortion figures.  I think that once this is done and becomes generally available to measure for DIYers, more and more people are going to see why horn loading sounds different.

 

Chris

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  • 1 year later...

I have had mine for just under a year and am blown away at how accurate they are and even at the quieter volume still sound so balanced and full... I have the ALK universal crossover

with wool padding (but not much).. running with a 6watt valve amp... just lovely.. Though will eventually put them in a room double the size in the future move.

 

with wool Image may contain: living room, table and indoor

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