oxric wrote:

I believe that although you may be wrong to make a difference between ULF and the rest of the frequency range….

oxric wrote:

I see a number of logical flaws with this view and I was hoping someone else, who may have a similar feeling to yours, would try to expand on it before I and/or others start discussing or criticising what is not a fully fledged argument. The first view must be right. Without integration, and a homogeneous sound to start with, the result is complete chaos. In fact one can only look at your system to see the high order of integration ….

oxric wrote:

A second objection is that why single out the ULF channel? For instance, why not make the midrange a separate 'stand-alone awareness of sound' or all the channels to varying degrees? You have never previously and I do not think you are now making a change in your need to integrate these channels. So it looks to me that for your view to even start making sense that there must be something about ULF that makes it different to other channels, including in fact the mid-bass and upper-bass. What could that be?

oxric wrote:

I of course undertand that there is a difference in the way we perceive ULF when it comes to the way human hearing operates. I however cannot see a biological or anatomic rational that would require us to treat the integration of ULF any differently.

oxric wrote:

Could it be something about our exposure to ULF in commercial or domestic installations is so inherently flawed that we need a new language to capture the potential of the lowest frequency range? I am not convinced. I hope that as your ULF channel evolves you will tell us more about this rather novel and indeed revolutionary idea that the aim maybe is not to integrate the ULF as a 'continuation of Music but rather to be a separate stand-alone awareness of Sound.'

Romy the Cat wrote:

The major minor thing remains to find different lower bass. I said “minor” thing as my lower bass is not bad, in fact I do insist that it is very proper lower bass as I did set it up lately properly…..Despite that I insist that my currant bass is the PROPER bass I still would like to have slightly different, I have a feeling HOW it shell sound but I do not know at this point how to express it to myself in the format that I would be able to understand or implement. The things with bass will be continuing but without emergency of any kind.

Romy the Cat wrote:

However, the last few months, since I finished my midbass project, my views slightly changed. Nowadays I would like to have less ULF to midbass integration and I would like my ULF NOT to be a continuation of Music but rather to be a separate stand-alone awareness of Sound.  It is not as bad as it sound in writing and it need to be demonstrated, not explained at a web site. Unfortunately I can’t demonstrate it even to myself and I have the notion as a pure fiction of my mind, sort of a hallucination, a dream that I would like one day to render as a reality.  I do not have an itch about it, I perfectly might go along without it, using ULF as they are but if I do something about my ULF then I would like to navigate explicitly to what I want.

I do think about my lower bass, trying to get what I want. My current bass is very “integrated” and very musical. It low, it is large, it is extended and it is in away grandeur and it has nothing close with faulty Hi-Fi impressiveness. It never take over sound and never indicate the “bass efforts”. It is what it is and listening music with this bass I have no motivations or need to improve anything in lover bass.

However, I do have interests to have my bass to act differently.  What I would like is not the change of bass itself but the change how my room is being filled with bass. I mean I would like to be able to sense that my bass channel is on while my playback is not playing. I mean I would like to bias up my room by some excessive ULF pressure from my lover bass channels. The properly ULF biased room eats bad sounds. The LP clicks, the tape hiss and any other externals noises become not to be noticeable and the room gets that feeling of “space of empty opera theater.” The ULF channel us a mechanism to extend the boundary of the pool into which one dives – the larger pool the less back reflections from the pool boundaries…

I kind of know how to get the ULF to do the “boundaries bias” but what I reach any more effective ULF biasing I do corrupting my auditable lower and midbass. So, I kind of looking and understanding what kind alternative lower bass I might have in order the lower room biasing bass to be a separate entry with my musical lower bass. I do not have a solution yet and I am keep thinking about it. Right now I am waking around my clients offices, knocking the walls and desks and listening how they response. I am looking for an inspiration, perhaps in a wrong places...

Romy the Cat wrote:

My current bass is very “integrated” and very musical. It low, it is large, it is extended and it is in away grandeur and it has nothing close with faulty Hi-Fi impressiveness. It never take over sound and never indicate the “bass efforts”. It is what it is and listening music with this bass I have no motivations or need to improve anything in lover bass. However, I do have interests to have my bass to act differently.  The properly ULF biased room eats bad sounds. The LP clicks, the tape hiss and any other externals noises become not to be noticeable and the room gets that feeling of “space of empty opera theater.” The ULF channel us a mechanism to extend the boundary of the pool into which one dives – the larger pool the less back reflections from the pool boundaries… I do not have a solution yet and I am keep thinking about it. Right now I am waking around my clients offices, knocking the walls and desks and listening how they response. I am looking for an inspiration, perhaps in a wrong places... Rgs, Romy the Cat

Romy the Cat wrote:

The properly ULF biased room eats bad sounds. The LP clicks, the tape hiss and any other externals noises become not to be noticeable and the room gets that feeling of “space of empty opera theater.” The ULF channel us a mechanism to extend the boundary of the pool into which one dives – the larger pool the less back reflections from the pool boundaries…  I am looking for an inspiration, perhaps in a wrong places... Rgs, Romy the Cat

Paul S wrote:

Rakesh, if Romy's ULF is "faultless" at this point, then he should play the lottary - once.  Perhaps part of the quandry stems from confusing "bass" with ULF.  Once you let go of that, it better falls into place. As for the pops, clicks, tape hiss, etc., in the best cases they are present without interfering with the music.  Ideally, all extraneous noise can be minimized and/or "set aside" from the music, and there are actually rote ways to facilitate this, and Romy has either included his observations about ULF in this context or he has included the noise issues in the context of "ULF" features. One more thing is the "groove echo" foreshadowing of change that may make us at least appear to be out of sync with our own manifestos.  And every so often, a change makes the need for it clear.

oxric wrote:

If the issue is merely to recreate a better sense of the live performance….

oxric wrote:

As for the use of the multi-cell, I understand why you did not go for it much better now. It is interesting to note that aesthetic considerations can sometimes preempt something that was nonetheless deemed beneficial in other respects. Life, even our pursuit of perfection in our audio systems, has to be a balancing of priorities after all..

I have with bass not a problem but dilemma. I do not have problematic bass but I have a dilemma how to supplement my current bass with ULF without affecting my current bass. Adding ULF defuses my current bass, renders the bass phasing to be more generic and I will not tolerate it.

So, let analyze the situation and to build some rational behind it. I own 3 major ingredients– I have a great all together bass, I know what I would like to get as a result and I know how to discriminate successes and failures. What I do not know is the reason why my current ULF does not do what I want what I run it at full throttle. So, let analyze the possible reasons for underperformance.

1)      Instrumental problem: wrong ULF transducers wrong amplifiers.

2)      Implementation problem: wrong crossover frequency and slope.

3)      Timing problem, including the horizontal alignment.

Do I have instrumental problem? Possible. I would like to have larger drivers with resonant frequency of 11-12Hz. I do not have such drivers. The 10 drivers that I do have are 20Hz driver and it is very low. My problem is that I do not have just 12 of them but I have 24 of them. If I engage all of them then I will have an equivalent of ten 18” drivers – a LOT of displacement volume at true 20Hz and with very linear excursion. The amplification? I still think about it. Frankly the Instrumental subject might underperform but it is in my estimation is NOT the main reason. The character of the ULF sound and the way how ULF crap over my general bass advise me that I need to look somewhere else.

Implementation problem. As long as I spent time with placing with my ULF crossover it might be not enough time. I still might have wrong everything and the reasons why I was not a able to make the things to work in the way I want to is because the Timing Alignment.

This brings me to the last subject: the arrival aligned and the axis alignment. We so much believe that alignment s not relevant to bass that we do not even think about it. What we are taking about axis alignment we feel that for that low frequency the wavelength is so long that time difference in arrival from right side and left side of woofer is irrelevant. It might be all true but might be THAT is responsible for smearing of my bass by my ULF? I know that in my old place I had absolutely no problem with ULF but in my old place ULD and bass was reproduced by the same channel. What however was also in my place – my bass towers were in time- aligned position and the woofer were looking directly at me – there was no right/left side of driver misalignment.

So, looking for those 3 candidates I think I need to filter out the Timing problem first and if it is a factor then it will crap over other reasons. So, no matter how much my aesthetic inclinations protest me to do it I need to bring my ULF section right outside of Macondo, time-alight them and to see what happens. I think it has to be the burst step…

Romy the Cat wrote:

BTW, I spent today almost half of day conducting the experiments with my ULF and I think I did found the problem that was implanted into my enter ULF project so far. As I have time I will write a report. I am with 99% confident that the problem with ULF is resolved as I have not only my ULF performing as I would it to but also the alternation of the partially erroneous objectives that I have develop for the last 2 months while my ULF did not perform up to demands. Ironically, the problem was purely by my own making….

Yes, I promised to tell about, so here is comes.

The past Sunday I woke up at 6AM and first intention to answer to myself what is wrong with my ULF. I had wonderful sound with absolutely wonderful and the most important very proper bass.  However all my attempts to supplement my bass with ULF took sound in very wrong direction? As soon I added go 1/5 dB of ULF over my bass output the wait and the size of presentation was imidetaly growing but the leading edge of the midbass and bass notes got very severally defused and become non expressive. I did find a good balance between some added weight from the bottom and destruction of my midbass but it was near close what I would like to be, so I mostly prefect to hear my playback without ULF – it was very-very musical and nice presentation.

I was wondering why my woofer towers stopped working, they were working spectacularly in my old room.  I turn the playback on, crank my ULF for extras 3 dB and was listening what is doing on. I was paying attention to the deformity of midbass across midbass range. What I noticed is that lower midbass is got screwed differently then mid midbass and then upperbass again got screwed. It has to be timing related I figured.

I moved my ULF towers exactly under the driver of my midbass horns. The change was very interesting. The destruction of midbass still was there but it was very evenly dispersed across the whole midbass range. I kind of began to feel very idiotic about myself. Over the years I am very vocal and persistent advocate of prejudicial time aliment and not I was harvesting the crapy results because my ULF was not time aligned. There was however even more then time alignment. Over the year I made fun and humiliate the people who built “subwoofers in the corners” and now, putting my ULF woofer towers in basically another room I was essentially doing the very same. Yes, in that another room (look at the picture at the begging of the thread) the large woofer tower’s presence was absolutely not abusive but it is did not work for Sound.

So, what I did next was taking my woofer towers and the location where I use to have them for 11 years in my old room – on the outside side of Macondo in exact time-aligned position with the rest MF Macondo drivers. I turned the playback on and… had no ULF out at all. The drivers where moving but there was no sound – I need more gain I figured. In my old location I attenuated the ULF power amp for 8 clicks which is 24 dB. Not I max out my power amp and I only begin to have something. I opened up the ULF B2 amp and dropped feedback for 6 dB – not I have mode gain. The room’s bottom juts fallen off and it took in itself all it bass without exhibiting any sight of overload or any other negative experiences.

I would like to say that I did something smart – I did not. As soon I time-aligned the woofer towers and point then directly to the listening position then the Sound got instantly and automatically all sonic attributes that I was looking from ULF. I was extremely happy with result and very angry to myself for being such a fucking idiot and was trying to get some sound from a ULF configuration that I spend years to hate. I was so displeased with myself that I took the 4-wire 3Ga cable (fat and expensive) that my carpenter installed for me in the wall and pulled it out of the wall assuring the I have no more dedicated line from my equipment bay to my old location of the ULF towers.

Sure, I have some excuses.  I ordered my woofer towers as a custom project from John Danlavy back in 2000. At that time John was contemplating the woofer towers as a commercial project, in fact become a commercial project by my tower were made with a lot of negotiations and debates.  Since then I did not have any other bass in my room and this is the only bass I am accustomed for the last 11 years. I loved that bass from day # 1, in fact I so loved it that I got my second ML2.0 to drive my woofer towers. So, when I I put my woofer towers in the very same position as I has it in my old room I got instantly my old Marlborough Bass the I so loved and was so proud. 

Interestingly that bass that I have from those woofer towers is much more advanced then what I had in my old room. In my all room my woofer towers were bass module as they handle mid and lowest bass. In my new room my woofer towers are thru ULF as midbass horns care all auditable sound.  I very much the result and it only proves that all along my ranting about arrival-alignment, the latitude-alignment, the location of bass outside of MF and the rest of BS were very much accurate. Now, if I learn do what I pitch then I would same me so much aggravation, not only in audio BTW….

Here is the new location for my ULF of left chennal:

Rgs, Romy the Cat

…but there are a few considerations that I would like to stress.

1)    The ULF pressurization must not impact auditable sound in any negative way. If it does then all bets are off and ULF better do not be used.

2)    The ULF pressurization shall be max out to the point where ULF does not become own self-centric expressive force.

3)    ULF pressurization must be in absolute time-alignment and considering the geometry of the ULF transducers the ULF need to be in axis with listener.

4)    Considering that we use for ULF source the information that is recorded not always properly the ULF moderation during playback is advisable.

5)    I do not feel a need to administer ULF differently for chamber group and for a large orchestra in concert hall space

I would like to suggest an alternative factor or explanation to your recent ULF/midbass findings.

When you were chronicling the design and implementation of your midbass horns I was curious as to the effect of the very close placement of the two horns.

When two loudspeaker drivers are placed close together they become acoustically coupled and so more efficient than when spaced well apart. On in-phase signals, two closely placed drivers would play louder in the bandwidth where they are acoustically coupled but have significant destructive interference for out-of-phase signals. I think this might well apply to the mid-bass horns.

In addition to these effects, on in-phase signals the pair of midbass horns might also function something like a two-sector horn where the combined mouth area determines the low frequency cut-off. The low frequency cutoff would be lower for the two horns running in-phase signals than for a single horn.

I am not sure if you ever tested for any of these effects although I remember your pleasure at how the useful range of the midbass horns was lower than a simple formulaic analysis would indicate. To test for these effects you can’t test one channel at a time. You would have to run a frequency response test for both horns running simultaneously and compare the response to in-phase vs. out-of-phase signals.

Now the same issues and analysis applies to your woofer towers and with the new placement of the towers some of these effects may have become exposed.

If these effects are significant than your new wider spaced ULF towers might actually be functioning more effectively in their upper range than the midbass horns in their lower range on stereo recordings with phase differences between the channels in this frequency range.

Because of the low-pass roll-off on the ULF you may have found that a significantly elevated gain for the ULF is improving the music reproduction where the mid-bass horns have unwanted cancellation effects. But this elevated gain does not hurt the reproduction of the ambient/environmental sounds intended to be reproduced by the ULF towers because these sounds are much less sensitive to output level than the musical signal.

How significant these effects are in practice are less clear. Stereo phono records usually become quite monaural in the low frequency range to facilitate both cutting the master and playback tracking. CDs and other modern digital sources may have enough out-of-phase bass for the coupling/cancellation effects to be noticeable.

If you have found or suspected that your LPs and monaural source material have a somewhat richer or fuller sound in the bass than your digital sources this may be a clue.

Regards,
Robert