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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: My new “New” listening room, 2024
Post Subject: Ok, I have identified what I do not like about my soundPosted by Romy the Cat on: 5/15/2024
I did a lot of listening lately and observed that there is
something in my sounds that I do not like. Over the years, one of my primary indications
of a properly built playback was the sentiments I'm getting from my recordings.
One of them is the celebrated Giulini and Viena Brucker nine, first movement, the
first crash. It is certainly not a perfect recording from a technical
perspective, but musically, it is a spectacular interpretation and to my taste;
no matter how many times I listen to this performance and how much I know each
phrase in my heart, in a properly organized playback, the development, of this
crush should be slower than I expect. It is hard to explain. I have my
expectations in terms of slowness and the rate of expansion. What I expect is
that it should be slower and more massive than what my expectations are. It is
like Russian nuclear physicists who explored a 53-megaton bomb and reported
that the fireball was expanded, and nobody knew when it stopped spending. With
my current system I have a very good crush, but it expands exactly how I
predict and how I feel it should be. This is wrong in my book. The proper expansion
of Giulini’s crash should surprise me each time I listen to it. If not, then the
playback is faulty.
Analyzing reasons for this and looking at the history of my
installations, I need to admit the only proper rendering of this crash was in
my Woburn house around 2010 after I built the midday horns. My system at that
time had a very subtle trick that only one person who ever visited me recognized.
My mid-base horn was slightly over-dumped by my amplification, making the sound
very puffy and muddy. It was not auditable in normal music, but for Bruckner
music, it produced an additional heaviness for low registers for bassoons,
horns, trombones, and the rest of Bruckner's specialties during the high volumes.
It would not even be called EQ but was slightly longer and extended decay in
the middle bass but over dumped by the amp simultaneously. Only in that
listening room, I had astonishing Bruckner crashes. I have an exemplary clean
middle base right now, but I'm missing this heaviness, that chromatic
overbearing payload coming with the mid base at high volumes. It is almost like
I need some “dynamically distributed honk” at high volumes…
I'm not willing to build another 30-foot horn, but I am
contemplating what I can do with my Midwest channel to get this performance.
From a certain perspective, I would like my mid-base channel to be probably 2
dB louder. I can change the transformer to add gain. An additional option would
be to use 215-in drivers instead of one, which will give me more gains, but
then I would still need to change the transformer to ensure proper loading, and
it would be a long game to play with it. I have plenty of 15-in bins that I am
considering complementing my current mid-base channel and learning how it might
work. The most interesting thing is that I might use other 15-in drivers to
shape the lower knee of my mid base, for instance, Altec 515B.
And
finally, this is a completely crazy idea, making me super curious to experiment.
I can take another base bin with a 15-in driver to drive it from a separate
amplifier, and custom equalize it to produce the proper low register “clipping”
distortions I need during my crushes. I know it is completely stupid for audio
guys to claim that he wants to insert distortions, but I feel that in life
sound when brass plays at maximum volumes, there are very specific distortions,
almost clipping horn honk. I am afraid that my open baffle does not produce it.
It might be an exciting experiment in this direction.
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