| Search | Login/Register
   Home » Horn-Loaded Speakers» Macondo 3.0 (52 posts, 3 pages)
  Print Thread | 1st Post |  
Page 3 of 3 (52 items) Select Pages:  « 1 2 3
07-13-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
anthony
Posts 335
Joined on 08-18-2014

Post #: 41
Post ID: 27179
Reply to: 27178
Inspiration
Righto then, I guess there is no reason not to try this, except that one of the original crossovers here is non-functioning (if I remember correctly), so if trialling in stereo I'll have to crossover in Melquiades.  Should have the parts here to do that.

Have just spent quite a few hours back in the DSETs dotting the i's and crossing the t's with a few things, replacing the heater wiring, new super high quality DHT tube sockets, changing out crossover caps for my preferred variants (did the Upperbass coupling caps a few months ago from 950B to Duelund copper cast and the change was lovely, so more in that vein), changing out the pots in the DHT humbuckers to be rid of the last of that low level noise, modified the bias arrangement a little so that the DC Offset could be fully cancelled again (filter changes meant I could no longer set DC offset to zero) and a few other things.  

With the new filters I first plan to reset my time alignment properly and comprehensively as well as the channel SPL's.  I've figured out where I want to sit in the soundstage and the seating position is now locked down so it is the right time to do this precision tuning before playing with the Red tweeter.
07-14-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Bill
Kensington, NH
Posts 114
Joined on 03-15-2010

Post #: 42
Post ID: 27180
Reply to: 27155
Today's visit
Was invited over to Romy's today for a listen. In the last two days, he made several small but critical changes in the time alignment, crossovers, and room damping, and the sum of them has brought his system up by several notches producing the best and most natural music I’ve ever heard from a system. I will let him go over the particulars. From my perspective, he added has improved the minor problems heard on the last visit, with significant improvement of depth of field, removed the high frequency tizzies, and made the sound field razor sharp.

In Addition the bass is the closest I’ve heard to a concert hall without looseness or bloatiness. I can't believe he get the bass quality from tube amps.All in all a significant improvement. I wish all of you could visit him to hear what he has accomplished.On another bright note, he let me borrow a pair of his Vitavox drivers and horns to replace my tad midrange drivers, and I am in heaven. He is right, they are significantly better than the TAD drivers in conveying the beauty of the music.Bill
07-14-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,052
Joined on 05-27-2004

Post #: 43
Post ID: 27181
Reply to: 27180
Some tutorials



"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
anthony
Posts 335
Joined on 08-18-2014

Post #: 44
Post ID: 27182
Reply to: 27181
High Pass
Romy, I'll be digging round in my amps tomorrow and intend to install a filter for the red tweeter while there.  What should I be aiming for?  7kHz first order from memory, but hoping you can confirm.  Such a filter could be achieved just by changing the coupling cap (eg. 0.00022uF for 7.2kHz), but I won't get that drastic just yet.

Great to hear that your sound continues to improve. 


07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Bill
Kensington, NH
Posts 114
Joined on 03-15-2010

Post #: 45
Post ID: 27183
Reply to: 27180
Yesterday
Feeling less depressed this am. After returning from Romy's and coming down from the high produced by his sound, I made the mistake of turning on my system, which had sounded great the night before. Within less than a half hour I turned it off and went to bed. Compared to his, it sounded like a 60's solid state portable. After 76 years, 55 of which have been spent as audiophile and 14 years of reviewing for a high end audio webzine evaluating mega bucks equipment and systems at shows and homes, I am convinced that I have never heard anything close to what I did yesterday. If I were 20 years younger and not ready for an old fogies home in a couple of years, I¡d trash my system and build one matching his components, money be damned. If you get a chance, visit him and listen but be warned. There's no going back. It was the closest to a live performance in symphony hall or the Staatsverein I’ve ever heard. Of course part of this is due to his using surround techniques, which he calls delay but is really what I ( and he now) call HALL EFFECT REPRODUCTION, which attempts to reproduce what we actually hear in a concert hall, with it frequency changes, delays, and reverb decay. That makes up from 20 to 60 plus percent of what we hear in a concert hall depending on our seating.
07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Paul S
San Diego, California, USA
Posts 2,577
Joined on 10-12-2006

Post #: 46
Post ID: 27184
Reply to: 27183
The Nature and "Quality" of Main Channels and Delay
Bill, sorry to hear a low followed the high, and I know what you mean about getting old, but you did not mention in this post that you use DSP to improve the "overall" sound quality and to produce specific room effects, but Romy  - as far as I know - only uses delay for limited/targeted injected "sound effects", where, according to him, the "sound quality" of the injected sound is not especially important. This seems to be no small matter, since Romy gets his sound quality from his stereo arrangement of specific drivers powered by driver-specific amps, which is to say, amps that produce specific sound qualities from his specific drivers. Could it be that you heard the difference between two fairly different approaches to root/rote sound quality?

Best regards,
Paul S
07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,052
Joined on 05-27-2004

Post #: 47
Post ID: 27185
Reply to: 27182
The Red's Tweeter
 anthony wrote:
Romy, I'll be digging round in my amps tomorrow and intend to install a filter for the red tweeter while there.  What should I be aiming for?  7kHz first order from memory, but hoping you can confirm.  Such a filter could be achieved just by changing the coupling cap (eg. 0.00022uF for 7.2kHz), but I won't get that drastic just yet.

Great to hear that your sound continues to improve. 
 
I probably will be doing this weekend the same experiment. It is hard to say what crossover point to use. The default crossover has somewhere sub 2K and I used the max gain for the tweeter, where the sound floes over the cap Not good and there is a lot of expected improvements in there. I do not know the Red tweeter impedance but if to presume it is 8R then I will start with 7kHz Bessel curve, it will be 1.63uf cap and 0.31mH coil to ground. I will not go for anything electric as it is works I would like to build the filter at the basis of the Milq’s driver tube


"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
N-set
Gdansk, Poland
Posts 609
Joined on 01-07-2006

Post #: 48
Post ID: 27186
Reply to: 27183
Dannoys?
Bill, how about your Dannoys? Some time ago you wanted to dismantle your horns in favor of Dannoys or it was more of a figure of speech Wink?
I keep loving mine and think they are the best choice for a small space I have.




Cheers,
Jarek
STACORE
07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,052
Joined on 05-27-2004

Post #: 49
Post ID: 27187
Reply to: 27186
Do not salt my wounds....

 N-set wrote:
Bill, how about your Dannoys? Some time ago you wanted to dismantle your horns in favor of Dannoys or it was more of a figure of speech ?
I keep loving mine and think they are the best choice for a small space I have.

N-set, two years ago I did exactly that, I dismissed my horns in favor of Dannoys. It was extremely worse to do as a result Dannoys produced was stunning. During those two weeks in August 2020. The problem is that neither bill or me were able to replicate this setting. I am not kidding this all marvelous result I feel I would give it up it again I were able to get my August 2020 sound from Dannoys. We did discuss it with Bill yesterday.


"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
07-15-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Romy the Cat


Boston, MA
Posts 10,052
Joined on 05-27-2004

Post #: 50
Post ID: 27188
Reply to: 27185
Red’s tweeters
Ok, did today the Red’s tweeters. Got rid of the original Tannoy’s cable mounting plate and ran my own cable directly from twitter.  Drove it with Milq’s full range channel. Used the speaker level 2uf cap (my favorite high voltage eQube coupling cup and I am not sure how it holds at speaker level) with 0.33 air coils that I happens to have in my hands. It made near Bessel ~6K crossover. A bit too low but it gives the idea unit I find my box with my coils. I took off the Vitavox S2 midrange and wanted to listen for a while to the whole sound with Red’s tweeters. Yes, I have no MF but so what… The first feeling is that Red’s tweeters. Is VERY elegant in this configuration. I am sure the cap will take time to break in. The good thing is about the volume, it looks like I will be running it about munis 8-12dB from the Milq’s full gain which opens an opportunity even to ideal the Milq’s loading much more if I need it. I will take my older son tomorrow to my secretive place to by good vintage coils, the MIT flea market. I will pick a bunch of the coils

 to play with…Macondo3.0_TannotTweeterCrossover.jpg


"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche
07-16-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Bill
Kensington, NH
Posts 114
Joined on 03-15-2010

Post #: 51
Post ID: 27189
Reply to: 27186
1year gone
I worked on the Dannoy's for about a year, first with the Vitavox bass driver, then using two tannoy red 10's using only the cone for the second unit to improve volume and bass reproduction. Changed out amplifiers, used original, English new knockoffs, and my trinnov altitude prepro, but could never get back To what he had for those two weeks. So returned the cabinets and charged him with rebuilding the speakers to his original configuration to see if it was a fluke. Maybe after he finishes his latest project.

As far as Romy's delay, he is actually using a Yamaha unit, which actually is supposed to mimic the delay, decay times and frequency changes of the hall sound from various concert halls. Yamaha actually went around to various concert halls, jazz veneues, etc., and recorded the Hall effect, then used that information to try to mimic what one hears in various concert halls.

What stereo can't do is give that concert Hall effect, melding all of the reverberation into the front channels. What we hear in a concert hall is actually only 80 to less than 20% of the actual artists, depending where one sits, and the rest is Hall effect. I used a similar system years ago to good effect, but with the trinnov using Auro 3D, which extracts the hall sound from the recording if there, and sends it to the surround(sorry I meant Hall effect) channels. Unhappily multimike recording stand out in worse quality. Auro 3D also does a superb decoding of 5.1 track sacd recordings. It is far superior to Dolby, and dts.

You don,t need great equipment for the hall channels, just good. If you have a couple or a few speakers, and maybe a receiver or prepro with Dolby or dts d3coding, and a preamp two channel out from your main preamp, try it out. Even better, get a Yamaha decoder like Romy, or a receiver wit Auro 3D like me, and enjoy. No more listening through a door or window.
07-16-2023 Post does not mapped to Knowledge Tree
Paul S
San Diego, California, USA
Posts 2,577
Joined on 10-12-2006

Post #: 52
Post ID: 27190
Reply to: 27188
Toilet Paper
I just remembered that Haralanov and I discussed at length the merits of "mechanical filters" vs. electronic filters. We also agreed that a tweeter can sound much better when it's nested in a larger paper cone.

Best regards,
Paul S
Page 3 of 3 (52 items) Select Pages:  « 1 2 3
Home Page  |  Last 24Hours  | Search  |  SiteMap  | Questions or Problems | Copyright Note
The content of all messages within the Forums Copyright © by authors of the posts