Things are starting to come together.
Trim out is now finished on the in wall system. Two final pieces of trim were added today. My wife is over the moon with it, especially now I have her ipod connected to the system. I'm barely allowed to touch it now!
This is the last picture I have, but before the last couple of pieces of trim.
This "little" system easily fills this large space open to the stairway to the second floor. The sound is very even throughout the space. It has really good coverage. This is true especially for the bass. The 10" TL sub has good even coverage through out the space. There seem to be zero low or high spots, and even the boom and bang movies do very well. The sub seems very efficient. In fact I was having trouble with too much bass. Audyssey has set the crossover point at 40 Hz to the sub. Strangely this does sound to be optimal, even though the F3 of the three speakers is 83 Hz, 12 db per octave roll of. I suspect this is occurring for two reasons. First stacking wall reflections as this is an in wall system with no protrusions beyond the plane of the wall. Secondly because of band pass issues with the center woofers. Crossover to the mid of the center speaker is 400 Hz. This gives the woofers a range of a little over 3 octaves, which is optimal for controlling band pass gain issues.
This has made me realize, that in this day of subs, three way speakers are a problem in the event there is a low crossover point below 400 Hz. If there is then when these speakers are going to have serious band pass issues and uneven bass response when used with a sub. I now feel three or four way speakers with a low crossover below 400 Hz to the mid are NOT suitable for use with conventional subs
There is another issue I have come to realize with mixing two way mains and three way centers and vice versa. In a three way with the cross to the mid is likely to require a second order electrical crossover in the woofer active pass band. So the best response is likely to be with a phase reversal at crossover. This center speaker modeled best the reverse phase to the mid. That was the way it was originally installed. However there were severe integration issues with the right and left speakers which do not have a phase reversal. So at the crossover points at 400 and 4 kHz the speakers phased correctly, but were out of phase with the right and left speakers throughout most of the pass band of the center mid driver. This resulted in really poor integration of the three speakers, with marked change in sound with changing position. So I cancelled the phase reversal of the mid, and found it far better to accept slight null at the crossover points than have the center mid out of phase with the right and left speakers over most of their pass band.
So the bottom line is that if you have three way mains with two way center or vice versa, there is a high probability that you have a severe compatibility problem resulting is severe degrading of sound quality. I had never considered this issue before, but I'm now certain there are systems out there severely compromised by it.
The two channel family room system has been up and running for a while. However the room is next door and being used as a staging area for the studio build and therefore a relative mess.
The new AV room/studio is now starting to come alive, and I'm listening to it now.
It is quite a task, I had to reinstall 28 drivers and install four new ceiling speaker for 32 drivers in all. At the amp end this resulted in 40 individual wire terminations.
This is the front speaker terminal block. The speaker runs in conduit are 10 AWG Belden.
The rear group terminal.
There is 600 ft of 10 AWG speaker cable in the system.
Some views of the construction of the amp case. This is what 18 power amp channels able to deliver 3.9 KW of audio power all channels driven looks like.
The new LG 77" OLED TV is up and running is superb. The rebuilt HTPC for 4K is up and running.
The new Panasonic BD player is set up as well as the 4K 7705 Marantz pre/pro.
The three AV racks are now populated, with Comcast and the disc players on line in addition to the HTPC. Grounding appears good as the system is very quiet.
The first AV rack and power amp case, also the TV are fully functional. The analog equipment, DAW and turntable case remain to come on line.
I hope to have this complete some time next week, and trim out started if not complete and the parts sent for finishing. Hopefully the system will be complete in a couple of weeks or so.
After 8 months, I had forgotten just how superb this speaker system really is. In this significantly larger space the speakers are shinning better than before. Bass now seems totally uniform through out the space.
So I'm looking forward to a winter of great music.
This continues to be a massive undertaking.
On a personal note, my wife and I were married 50 years ago today and we will have a celebration for family and close friends tomorrow.
