These speakers dominated the listening session on Tuesday evening, we always spin vinyl but these were on when we entered the room and still on 4 hours later.
Imaging and midrange balance is really perfect. I can't hear anything lacking when compared to the House speakers that use that glorious midrange driver. And since the midrange is being covered by the tweeter, it actually got faster. I thought there would be a tradeoff, but there is not.
My only complaint was that the bass weight was slightly heavy for my taste. Just a tiny bit thick. Still.
So, tonight I decided to hook the speakers to the Zen TORII Mono's which are the appropriate amplification. Up until now I have been using the Sarah 300B turned less than half way up. More than enough power which was a nice surprise. I have to have them at 3/4 on the house speakers to get to the same place.
Virtually nothing really changed. Overall the presentation is a touch tighter, but the bass is still just as it was before. Then I remembered that the monos have a bias window switch that lets you go from EL34 type tubes, to KT88's. When I created that, it was to be able to play around with more tubes than just KT88's. And I remembered that some WE6CA7 replicas that I like quite a lot sounded a touch lean in the TORII Monos but otherwise glorious.
Light bulb went on! This is why we love tubes right! Don't like the sound of something, change it! So I went and got those tubes, set them up in the TORII Monos and have been listening to my demo track library all evening.
It's perfection. Most of these tracks I never really heard sound right or sound this good. The low bass is just so fast it is by far the best bass I have had in this room, or in any room for that matter. It's visceral, open, warm, textured, articulate and deep as fk when the music takes it there.
So, we are making some great progress here. Audio Gods are pretty happy, apparently there was a bet about if I would get the idea about the red tubes...
It is just amazing the transformation. Believe it or not, there was three times when I was going to sell my Cambridge Edge NQ because for that kind of money I should never hear anything come out of it I don't like. It was those nights when I forgot to turn on the Gizmo 2 on the Lii Headwreckers. Anyway, thank God I didn't do that!
These speaker cabinets are just sick. They have the same amount of bass as the full size Imperial somehow. It's tighter. Tight bass is like high compression on a motor. So there you go, I went from making excuses for thick bass to praising how tight it is.
And I will have to say this... another shocking lesson by the Audio Gods. My whole life large horns like this have been challenging to use in smaller rooms without creating huge standing waves in the at least several bass frequencies. These have been no different, or so I thought.
Boy it must be frustrating to design something and have the stooge using it not even realize how good it is. . For the first time these horns are giving me perfect bass in this room without missing holes and obnoxious peaks. I just sit in my chair in total amazement being able to hear it all with this kind of percussion. The horn is like a piston that inflates your room and then sucks the air back out of it. Box speakers and open baffles can't do that. Nor can panels. Nothing can. Only large horns. And once you get a taste of it, you'll be wrecked.
Linearity in bass is rare. Room acoustics make it so. I will have to really ponder how this is possible that the DFH sitting in the same location suddenly lacks the holes and the peaks in the bass from the listening chair and everywhere else in the room and outside the room. It's the same everywhere so far as I can tell. This kind of linearity will make me live longer : )
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