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Kraut's New Listening Space

nyhifihead said:
coming along nicely. your speakers are pretty aggressively toed in for that distance.

I would try doing perpendicular to the front wall aka straight out, your soundstage may expand and may offer a more cohesive sound
Click to expand...

I toed them out, to almost perpendicular for starters, and it's WAY better. Thanks for the suggestion!

In other news, the new sub arrived: JAMO J-112 in gloss white. They've been 'giving' these away on that auction site lately.
It's a 12", rear ported, 300 W RMS, Klipsch R-112 clone. Klipsch and JAMO are owned by the same company.
It's a monster at 17" cube, but the woofer only measures 11" from the outside edges of the surround, or 9" just the cone.
I really wonder how they ended up at 12"...
But we'll see how it does. I'm going to play with placement in the room for a while before I'll pass a judgement.



 
I've been working on making some DIY broadband absorber panels for the wall. After some back and forth I decided they will be 24" square, with a 3" wood frame holding 2" thick acoustical material 1" from the wall. I'll span them with some fabric from Jo-Ann's or something.
However, instead of them being just flat faced, I want them to have a front profile. I settled on a style, then made a 1/4 scale (6" square) model to figure out the simplest way of constructing it.
Here it is:





I loosely draped an old t-shirt over it just to show you how the fabric is supposed to span over it (finished product will look better lol):







It essentially just has a canyon running across it diagonally. Four of them arranged in a square looks like an 'X'.

The tools I used:

 
It's crazy what slight changes in speaker placement can do for the sound

very cool, some of the nice broadband panels I've seen from companies like auralex are impressive, but insanely expensive.

DIY the way to go, broadband absorbers are great at your first reflection points
 
It's been a while since the last update.
Regarding the JAMO sub, I've had to play with placement a bit to get it to actually blend with the towers.
The only place it sounded acceptable was centered between the towers, on the same plane. In other words it was right in front of the whole stereo, completely blocking everything with its glossy massiveness.
I used an NHT passive volume control to adjust the sub level from my listening position.
Two identical subs is really what the doctor ordered, that would've fixed the placement issue and increase the sweet spot.

Overall I was underwhelmed with the sub for several reasons, so I resold it. When pushed, it made really loud port noise that sounded like distortion. Like a loud crackling sound. It didn't deliver the sound pressure I had hoped for, and sounded flabby and not tight. This is all after plenty of break-in time. Not great for music. I bet in the right room it would do fine with movies though.

Next. I hung an old fleece blanky on the front wall between the speakers, completely killing the (high and mid) early reflections from the front wall.
THIS made the single biggest improvement to my system yet. It brought the entire sound stage several feet closer to me at my listening position.
With the bare wall, the sound stage sounded recessed into the wall, like the singer was a couple feet behind my front wall.
The upside to this was depth, but the downside was increased early reflections and overbearing upper mids and highs.
So with that fleece blanket on the wall, the vocals sounded like they were hovering right between the two speakers. Phenomenal, totally mind blowing what a difference that sound treatment made.
So I set out to get something a little better looking than the old fleece blanky, something more permanent.
Enter the rug-on-the-wall solution:



Also, the NHT towers have been pulled out from the wall by 3 feet (from the front baffle to the wall) and not at all toed in, as in zero toe. I've had them running like this for a few months now, and they really sound their best like this. That's about 6.5 feet from tweeter to tweeter.
Sound stage is the widest this way, imaging is great, and since the tweeters are a little hot (or is it my preamp???) it helps having them slightly off-axis.

I really have nothing but good things to say about these NHT SuperTwos. What they don't have in midbass dynamics they make up for with sub bass impact and huge sounds. Slightly laid-back mids and sweet, detailed highs.
I'm bi-amping them so I don't care about their power-hungryness / inefficiency.

Having said all that, I may have done a thing.
...to be continued.

 
Justgotohm said:
Looking forward to your impression of the JBL,s, you've got your place looking great.
Click to expand...

Thank you. The room is far from done, but it's taking shape...
JBLs still only at 40 hrs or so, but so far they're just amazing. Everything I'd hoped for in a speaker.

This little guy followed me home last night:





Technics SL-1500 w/ brand new Shure M97x.
I feel extremely fortunate to have found it in near mint condition, literally not a scratch on it. It was just professionally cleaned and given a clean bill of health. The dust cover is near perfect and stays up as it should. New Shure is breaking in right now.
The feet seem a little collapsed, I think I'll convert to SL-1200 mk2 feet, unless someone has a better suggestion?
Thanks for looking.
 
Decided to start on the corner bass traps.
Main reason for this is that I hate how right in the middle of the room the bass is by far the weakest, and that's pretty much where the listening position is.
Literally anywhere else in the room, the bass is significantly stronger.
Hopefully the floor to ceiling super chunk corner bass traps will help with this a little at least...
I decided to go with a 24" across. Decided against 36" across because I'm still planning on adding several broadband panels at first reflection points.

















To be continued...
 
Some major changes. The JBL Studio 580 are so MUCH more efficient than the power hungry NHTs, that the TEAC integrated has no problems driving them at moderate levels. Thus no need for the YAMAHA preamp anymore. However, the power amp will be hooked up to the TEAC eventually, just gotta get preouts added first.
Meanwhile, the TEAC's got a great phono stage, so I've been enjoying that while going through all my old records.
And no more cables running across the room! #winning

 
Awesome bass traps man, I have the gik acoustics corner ones I would have made my own but I got a deal on like 15 panels from a studio closing. Insulation for the money is your best friend for absorbing.

I briefly had the ns10s, they are good but the price where I live is based on the intrinsic value of their production capability

its really cool you found that though I'd say thats an extremely rare occurence

not sure I'm even impressed for them with for production in 2017, I think the cult following blows it out of proportion. people in NYC will snatch them up for 800-1k+ without thinkin!!

Used active JBL, Genelac, ATC offer better performance, almost all of them are active biamped with high bias class ab, offers a lot of value for a studio thats on a lease and space is a luxury.

good amount of the large amps I've gotten have been from small studios throughout nyc that are dumping their huge hot inefficient bryston 4b, hafler 9505/p7000, qsc mx1500a to get active solutions. I've particularly been impressed with ATC one of their 3 way models has a dome mid like infinity- active 3 way class ab MOSFET amplification, big heat sinks

I knew these ATC were expensive but they blew me away, granted it was in a studio built around them they seriously sounded sublime.

crazy argument for the solution of matching speakers to amp...
 
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nyhifihead said:
Awesome bass traps man, I have the gik acoustics corner ones I would have made my own but I got a deal on like 15 panels from a studio closing. Insulation for the money is your best friend for absorbing.

I briefly had the ns10s, they are good but the price where I live is based on the intrinsic value of their production capability

its really cool you found that though I'd say thats an extremely rare occurence
Click to expand...

That's exactly right.
For nearfield monitoring on a budget, there are more viable options out there. IMO the 10s are just a cool slice of iconic recording history, a novelty item.
I've always liked their looks as well.
They're listed for sale now, mainly bc I have no use for them, but I think someone else might really appreciate these for what they are.

Those big ATCs with the dome mids are incredible. That mid is supposed to be very dynamic as well.
I also like big, inefficient, hot, monster amps hehe. Cool looking heat sinks is always a plus...

With that Ashly XR-1001 I've been using, it's a snap to bi-amp. It's only a matter of time until I bi-amp the new JBLs fully actively as well, just have to have pre-outs and main-ins added to the TEAC integrated. The TEAC's class A/B sound is fantastic IMO, it will go on the horns. The YAMAHA P1600 power amp will power the woofers, it also sounds very good.

 
I've been working on a huge wood working project for the last few weeks, I'm building a new console for the stereo to replace the simple 2x12 bench.
I'll post more pics of the process later, but here's a teaser. Basically edge-glueing a bunch of hardwood pieces together to make the table tops, smooth side up and skyline side down.
It's mostly maple, hickory, walnut and some poplar.



The second skyline diffusor for the rear wall is finally assembled. They're made out of some 60 year old 4x4s that used to be part of a deck.







I'll snap a pic of it installed later.
Tonight I glued up some quick 'n' dirty speaker stands for some sweet JBL L40s. The stands are made of 1" thick pine and scrap hickory cross braces. I'll stain them black so they don't stand out on their own and compete with the L40s' walnut.

 
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