GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: A listening room for a domesticated Cat?

Post Subject: Quick thoughts on beginning of system assemblyPosted by scooter on: 8/17/2016

I helped Romy shuffle around some hardware and connect some cables yesterday. That damned table weighs about 100.000 pounds. This was one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to see live, in-person how Romy thinks about audio and incorporates that into his playback. That said, everything I saw yesterday is detailed extensively in the site.

From a living perspective, the new room is very pleasant with comfortable dimensions and a nice view. For a US house, I think the build quality is very good and the room feels quite "solid." A developer clearly built this house for himself. The room is still unfurnished but has an oriential rug, some media shelves mostly populated, some boxes and two friendly cats. The ceiling is high and vaulted and there is an alcove / open stairway down to the rest of the house. The room seemed like it might have good audio potential but if it would not have surprised me if it had real problems out of the box. Frankly, I had no clue how the room would sound but nobody will mistake me for an audiophile or audio pro.

A few constraints as this was a very preliminary set-up:

- No furniture
- Preamp was not connected yet (just some DIY $30 stepped attenuators)
- Missing some fq and unbalanced fq response. Top horns not connected. Need to find the RAAL tweeters and injection channel. I think there are some additional boxes that go on top of the towers also
- No regeneration yet as electrician needs to do some rewiring
- Equipment needs a few days to warm up
- No time alignment
- No tweaking
- etc. etc. etc.

A couple of thoughts:

- The dynamics were fantastically wide on the "volume" dimension and fantastically fast on the "time" dimension. Noting the massive limitations above, individual instruments sounded like instruments. Never heard anything like that before

- I feel the system somehow can play ppp virtually the same as it plays fff

- Other than some (quite) excitable nodes there is not much on the low end. Romy said adding the 2 boxes on the towers and adjustments will help. I have no clue how he will do that. There is a large attic above so creative opportunity there

- Anyways, the sound was pretty enjoyable with lower volume, lower dynamic, simple passages. As the music became more complex with more instruments, things really collapsed and sometimes was grating, near painful. Reminded of the Audeze LCD2 that fell apart on more complex passages (although I think the cause was very different as headphone "driver" was just breaking up).

Romy said the sound was about 20% of where it will be after final set up.

Romy called sound, "Pleasant." I thought the sound and room were, "Encouraging" with real potential for fantastic results. Maybe we can agree on, "Pleasantly Encouraging."

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site