Interesting trip LR and Palomino. A lot of good information from your Palomino room ride. I have few thoughts.
My seriously modded Oppo 83, for the subtler stuff does not remotely compare with my Tranquility DAC with PureMusic and a Mac Mini...except for playing movies
. I hear the newer Oppos are better, but based on your explorations, I wonder if the Oppo might be an aspect your image issues LR???
I have decent stuff throughout...cables, feet, power, vibration control and lots of tubes to play around with for synergy, but "live" player in the room sound is the norm here. Also, my MG944s image beautifully in my main room (this one has various treatments but no traditional diffusors), and also in my untreated workshop with a Rega Apollo in front of the Torii MKIII, but tonal balance is not as good there. I have damped the mid/bass drivers a touch with 3mm Marigo dots and this definitely "awakens" and tightens the speakers by calming dulling resonance.
Both rooms here have good stuff shape-wise and material-wise. They have diffusion of sorts in the ceilings with irregular round log beams and rough boards with gaps on top. Then a tarpaper "diaphragm" under thick fiberglass. The image is deep, wide, saturated and stable with the 944s, no vise necessary, though being in the middle areas are the best. There was virtually no image change bringing in the HR-1s.
With the MKIII an MKIV piano is very, very real with my 944s, though the HR-1s do it better. Both systems sound like players in the room with half decent recordings. I have experimented a lot, but I take this quality as normal.
On my main system I do EQ to fine tune, also having explored cap rolling, cable rolling, speaker damping on both pair, various feet and foot placement, room treatments, and tubes to no end, all toward that real and live sound without harsh. It has been fun and in the end the system has a very convincing balance.
I have a few 3mm dots on the HR-1 drivers also, as well as a couple deflex panels inside tightening them up. I found this to articulate the sound throughout while maintaining warmth and excellent balance. Everything became more real sounding from bows on strings to big drum hits.
One area that was really interesting to me was adjusting the HR1 tweeters with caps and resistors to
balance the highs. It was amazing once the macro and micro detail balanced out...more information, but appearing less bright. I am a sucker for micro detail, and this further improved stuff I love... the bow on strings and wood of an instrument, the hammer pad on the piano string, fingers on strings, the roll and shimmer of a cymbal, ambiance near the player and far.... all there before, but it is more balanced and smoother now...there, but it is not in your face. I have not gone there with the 944s, but know it is possible ...I think it is the same tweeter..simpler really as there is no resistor.
I don't know Raven, seems like you have a fair bit of treatment....have you ever tried EQ, or maybe better yet, Palomino's front end in your room and maybe play with his software EQ. If not a fix, it could be informative to see if you can pull things into better image focus and locate problem areas?
Is it possible that your bass, mid-bass and/or low mids are masking your mids to highs a bit too much? You might benefit from a little midbass or low bass cut in the right places....and/or some upper mid/high assistance to bring the upper mid balance to your room. For me, getting the right balance really helps clarify the sound stage and makes it more real/live sounding. Really good recordings are solid even with masked upper mids, but for depth and complexity, there is nothing like the right balance of mids, highs and bass to articulate the players in space.
I used to do this with tubes, but now tubes and EQ is better and easier. I do fairly complex EQ these days with a bunch of little parametric cuts and bumps as well as progressive low and high shelves. It is amazing to me what 1-3 dB in the right places can do for fine tuning!
But for experimentation it could be interesting just to try some really simple EQ tests...Like a low shelf that dumps heavily below 20 Hz or so... and maybe another low shelf with something like a 3db cut that you could slowly sweep from maybe 25 to 160 hz and see if it shows a problem area. If so, and things were a little off from the shelf, you could play with parametric cut(s) in the noted areas and keep the low dump if that helped. Even though my room does not measure much down there, I like the sound better with a low dump.
The other areas that could be informative and an easy test would be a high shelf....maybe adding about 3dB again for experimentation sake. I might sweep from somewhere around 2800 up to 7500 and see if somewhere things wake up in a real sounding way. Maybe even 1.5 dB would do the right thing to liven up and solidify the sound stage.
Just thinking out loud...good luck with it all!
This is fun thread to follow.
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