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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: The Opera Room

Post Subject: I was thinking about inter-modulations....Posted by Romy the Cat on: 5/22/2012

Romy the Cat wrote:
Stopped by at local audio friend this Sunday and watch some Brunner, Mahler and Wagner at his HT playback. He has integrated playback installation and video is played at his main system. I am not a fan of good quality of video playback and feel that my cheep Cetla 91 goes good enough to play video but I have to admit that there WAS some added value in his demonstration. I was not impressed by 5-ch sound (am long-standing not supporter of it) and with a few other aspects but for all intended purposes as Wand’s brass blew up during Bruckner 4 then it was very clear that my friend playback presented different definition of gravitas than my Opera Room able to. I have experienced something like audio envy and I said to myself that I want it to be in my home like this.

At this point I do not know what I will be doing. I might try to drive Cetla 91 with a full-range Milq or multi-amp it with Milq and B2. For sure the key in it is that I have no midbass or upperbass channels in Cetla and I am not exactly willing to make them. So, I wonder if I might come up with some kind of solution that would be easy to implement and deliver a sufficient impact. I do think that if I drive Cetla’s MF from SET then it might be more fun, let see how it goes….

I was thinking why the Brass crashes in my friend video system sounded to me so much more appealing then the bass crash in my opera room. I think the part of the answer (beside the “minor” fact that I use noise from ported 416 drivers but the friend of my use a pair of 50Hz straight horns) was the fact the friend of my heavily multiamping his playback. I think he has 4 channels and all of them multi-amped by SETs with active crossover before them. As I told in my “how to play Bruckner in audio” thread I feel that multiamping is very critical for Bruckner as it minimizes intermodulations. I did not detect the advantage in my friend sound during soft notes but as the volume grew the different is noticeable. I do not know how my B2 amp can handle intermodulations and how reactive the Cetla 91 is. I never paid too much attention to B2 sound full range. The temporary consumer grade amp that I was trying to substitute the B2 amplifier was horrible and I put B2 back to the service. Still I very much convinced that there are biter amps out there, particularly to drive compression drivers. I thought that it will not be too visible playing the compromised video sound. Well, apparently I was not correct. I got from my visit a phenomenal trophy – a stunningly interesting Wagner’s Ring production and I would like to make my video room to sound better for the ride over the Ring. It will be my first watching of entire Ring and I would like to make it “special”.

The Cat

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