What do you think the final weight will be ?
Somewhere between "UGH" and "GRUNT!" as I lifted one of them to my living room for a sound check.
SOUND CHECK!!!!!!
I just had my sound check tonight. I think I overachieved my goal, which is good and bad...
Well, my wife was sitting there reading a book, waiting for the Oscars to come on while I hooked up a Zolasoid II on the right channel, leaving the old Zolasoid I (the one that still works right) on the left.
Starting with a cheesey "Bass Mekanik" CD, I played first left, then right, then left then right. Suzanne's first reaction was "Is it me, or does the new speaker sound tighter?" I love the fact that she is relatively ignorant of the science behind audio, because her reactions are not formed from bias, but purely from observation. "What's that clicking sound?" I pressed the Speaker A button to turn off the Superzero's, and when the midrange and trebble disappeared, so did the clicking sound (bad recording).
Next CD was Pink Floyd's Division Bell (no cringing, purists!). UGh, no mid bass on the Zolasoid II. None at all. I adjusted the crossover, quickly remembering that with half the speaker impedance, I needed to cut the inductance in half to keep the crossover frequency at the same point. That helped, but not very much. "It sounds much weaker than the JL; is that because it's not broken in?" asked Suzanne, remembering our initial disappointment when we had brought home new speakers that initially sounded thin.
The final CD was "My Disc," a Sheffield test CD that I use in place of my frequency generator to produce low frequency sine waves. I started at 20Hz, and brought the volume up until the cone motion seemed reasonable, and let the CD slowly sweep up to 25Hz. "Am I feeling that???" asked Suzanne incredulously. SUB SONIC BASS ACHIEVED!! I'd played that track numerous times with both JL's (Zolasoid I speakers), and the bass was always heard before it finally got strong enough to feel in the 30's. Now the floor's actually vibrating before either of us hear it. YAHOO!!
Test Conclustions:
Well, I'm a long way from finished on sound check phase of this project. I simply plugged the Zolasoid II into an existing system that was tweaked for the Zolasoid I's. But in the back of my mind, I'm thinking that I was benefiting more than I thought from the higher Q Zolasoid I's upper bass boost that came at a cost to low end frequency excursion. Now that I have a virtually flat bass response, that upper bass boost is gone and sorely missed. I no longer have much of a woofer, but I have one HECK of a subwoofer. Two to be exact.
I might be able to massage my passive crossovers to bring back the gut punch, but it's somewhat likely I'll need to make some bigger changes such as:
1) Bi-amp with passive pre-amp crossovers, possibly a notch filter on the lows
2) Bi-amp with a graphic equalizer to punch up the midbass to Zolasoid I levels
3) Run the larger SB-1's full range, with a steep low pass filter below their operating range, allowing the Zolasoid II's to function as true subwoofers.
4) Cut the Zolasoid II boxes down to a smaller volume to raise the Q and thus make them operate more like upgraded Zolasoid I's.
Option 4 is actually what I did with the Zolasoid I's years ago. They started much taller than they are now, and they were bottoming out too badly at low frequencies while still weak at upper bass frequencies. In contrast, the Zolasoid II's are strong at their low frequencies, and would probably give up very little if operated at a higher Q.
I am excited about how tight and low these suckers go. At no time did the speaker seem to be out of control or straining (the old JLs always used to protest with mechanical helicopter thumping sounds when run at 20Hz), and the Denon was running cool with plenty of headroom to spare.
