Where were you 10 years ago?

[Brad1138]

Sir, I'm in awe of your Enterprise wall covering! I absolutely have to do something like that when and if my income gets better. Stunning, just stunning! Thanks for sharing your room. May your blessings be many.

Thank you
There is a forum thread somewhere on how I built them, I'll have to find it again, it's been years since I looked at it last.

 

[Morpheus]

Ok, 14 years ago this was my setup:

Sony TA-E1000ESD (Modded with Opamps and some more parts)
Sony SDP-9ES Dolby Digital Processor
Sony CD-PX33ES
Sony TA-N80ES
Sony TA-N55ES (3x)
Sony ST-S 333ES
Sony TC-K950ES
Active Crossover Behringer Super X-Pro 3400
Behringer 2x 31band Equalizer
Box Quadral Montan III - Active
Dual Transmissionlin Sub 2x12" (-3Db 18Hz)
Center JBL Control 1 Pro
HTPC Selfmade with Asus Xonar D2
Panasonic 46" Plasma

I Love this setup, it sounded realy good but there was two points that naggs me. The Sony Amps realy heated up the room in summer from 26°C to 31°C in short time. Second, the Transmissonline sub lags precision. The Bass was very soft, like with tube amps or so.
As time goes by the TAN80ES and the SDP9ES went to nirvana :-)
It follows a time where I tested new parts and technologies and one part of this was brand new Quadrals Platinum Nine+. I got them for 1800€ (NP 5000€). I didn't hear them befor. I was thinking with Quadral I can't get wrong and the price was top. But this was the worst buy I ever made. They produced a lot of sound artefacts between 1,8 - 3,6khz. Even with the DSP I was not able to get rid of them. What a garbage...
Today two Sonys are alive, the CD-PX333ES and the TC-K950ES. They where both serviced this year by a SONY specialist. Got a full recaping, new switches and so on. One Sony joined the duo, a SEQ33ES. The rest is :
Pioneer AV LX52
Geekom Mini-PC (15W!)
USB-DAC XMOS XU208
Mini-DSP DSP
Emotiva amp for Ripol (550W)
Selfmade RiPol Sub (2x 15" double voice coil)
Tannoy Gold 8
4 Bookshelf Magnat for center and sourround
65" Sony TV
The Tannoys are realy amazing. You can hear them all day long wihout getting tired of them, realy wow, and that for this price.
The Ripol was selfmade and gives the best bas I ever had. Dry, dry, punchy and dry :-) (22Hz -0db).

That's it.

Cheers William

 

[gp4Jesus]

Ok, 14 years ago this was my setup:

Sony TA-E1000ESD (Modded with Opamps and some more parts)
Sony SDP-9ES Dolby Digital Processor
Sony CD-PX33ES
Sony TA-N80ES
Sony TA-N55ES (3x)
Sony ST-S 333ES
Sony TC-K950ES
Active Crossover Behringer Super X-Pro 3400
Behringer 2x 31band Equalizer
Box Quadral Montan III - Active
Dual Transmissionlin Sub 2x12" (-3Db 18Hz)
Center JBL Control 1 Pro
HTPC Selfmade with Asus Xonar D2
Panasonic 46" Plasma

View attachment 75152

I Love this setup, it sounded realy good but there was two points that naggs me. The Sony Amps realy heated up the room in summer from 26°C to 31°C in short time. Second, the Transmissonline sub lags precision. The Bass was very soft, like with tube amps or so.
As time goes by the TAN80ES and the SDP9ES went to nirvana :-)
It follows a time where I tested new parts and technologies and one part of this was brand new Quadrals Platinum Nine+. I got them for 1800€ (NP 5000€). I didn't hear them befor. I was thinking with Quadral I can't get wrong and the price was top. But this was the worst buy I ever made. They produced a lot of sound artefacts between 1,8 - 3,6khz. Even with the DSP I was not able to get rid of them. What a garbage...
Today two Sonys are alive, the CD-PX333ES and the TC-K950ES. They where both serviced this year by a SONY specialist. Got a full recaping, new switches and so on. One Sony joined the duo, a SEQ33ES. The rest is :
Pioneer AV LX52
Geekom Mini-PC (15W!)
USB-DAC XMOS XU208
Mini-DSP DSP
Emotiva amp for Ripol (550W)
Selfmade RiPol Sub (2x 15" double voice coil)
Tannoy Gold 8
4 Bookshelf Magnat for center and sourround
65" Sony TV
The Tannoys are realy amazing. You can hear them all day long wihout getting tired of them, realy wow, and that for this price.
The Ripol was selfmade and gives the best bas I ever had. Dry, dry, punchy and dry :-) (22Hz -0db).

View attachment 75153

View attachment 75154

View attachment 75155

That's it.

Cheers William

DIY to 20hz or lower in a small-ish closure - you got my attention!

I think I saw a sub closure design something like if not the same on Pinterest. What driver or specs for the same get things started?

Thanks

 

[Chris A]

[EDIT (11/3/2024): When I started on my current setup in 2007, I had already spent 25 years with a pair of Magnapan MG-IIIa's and some Carver electronics (acquired in 1984). After raising a family and getting them educated, I started looking around for "the next thing". I wasn't too thrilled with the lower dynamic range of the Maggies, and the very small effective sweet spot in stereo mode. I wanted something that had a lot more distortion-free dynamic range and a huge soundstage with as large a sweet spot as possible. Additionally, this was the first actual attempt at a real hi-fi multichannel sound reproduction setup (i.e., NOT a lo-fi home theater). I already had some good recordings that had multichannel formatted into them (DVD-A, multichannel SACD, BD audio, etc.) so I wanted to create a real hi-fi multichannel setup. I knew the advantages of horn-loaded loudspeakers, having had a Khorn that my father had built with Paul Klipsch's tips and pointers when he was teaching EE at SMU in the mid-1950s. What you see below is my path toward that goal.]

December 2007 and the brand new corner horns looked like this (Khorn clones and a temporary pile of junk for electronics, as my stack of hi-fi electronics from early adulthood had aged out and the caps no longer supported operation, as well as the Magnapan MG-IIIa's that didn't survive my son's volume control operation). This was the last time it was stereo-only, and It looks sparse. But those full room corners are very conducive to corner horns:

[EDIT: I came across the "Klipschorn II" on the company website (now called the Klipsch Jubilee) in the fall of 2007 after acquiring the Khorn clones in late summer 2007, and was intrigued. These were sold as professional cinema loudspeakers at the time, since the Klipsch company had declined to market the last loudspeaker design that Paul Klipsch participated in. The engineer that worked with PWK at the time worked exclusively in their cinema (Klipsch Professional) division in Hope AR, so he simply got the okay to market them as cinema loudspeakers since they had a lot of dynamic headroom and high efficiency, as well as extremely consistent polar coverage (unlike most home hi-fi loudspeakers).

So that lead engineer indulged the request of a horn fanatic (Mike Beasley) to put together a two-way version of the cinema Jubilee for home hi-fi duty. These loudspeakers came in "basic black" at the time, only. My pair of loudspeakers were the 9th pair of these 1st-gen home hi-fi Jubilees to be sold.

The catch? These came without crossovers (they assumed the user would employ DSP crossovers that were ubiquitous in pro audio circles at that time) and a cheap pair of 2" compression drivers (that I later upgraded to TAD TD-4002s). So not only did I buy a Duratex-black pair of loudspeakers that were marketed to commercial cinema (mine were two-way versions of a three-way cinema loudspeaker), I also had to buy my own DSP crossover and program it to hear these loudspeakers in my listening room.

The rest of the story became somewhat legendary (or infamous, depending on your point of view) among horn loudspeaker enthusiasts. Finally, in 2022, the 2nd-generation of Klipsch Jubilees (now their flagship hi-fi loudspeaker) finally arrived, functionally the same as the first generation loudspeaker...and the price of the loudspeakers increased by a factor of 5.

However, in those intervening 15 years, I developed my personal abilities as a horn loudspeaker designer (especially after along the way retiring from an aerospace corporation after a career in engineering very large systems. My skills in this new-to-me engineering domain improved immensely during multiple reconfigurations and tests of these large full-range horn loaded loudspeakers, until what you hear today bears little resemblance to those original black cinema loudspeakers delivered to my doorstep in 2007. It didn't stop at stereo-only, but when I completed the array of loudspeakers to include a 5.1 surround sound setup with two tapped horn subwoofers (fc of 14 Hz). The following is a pictorial history of that setup.]

In June 2010, Jubilees, with DIY TH subs behind them, had arrived and the electronics rack is starting to fill up. I was still working for living and not having any time to listen or do a lot of improvements. I had trouble finding a good center loudspeaker that could actually match Jubilee timbre. The one you see is a black Heresy that didn't really match. The surrounds are stock Cornwalls:

In Jan 2015, after retirement from "working for the other guy" with added nearfield absorption panels, corner bass traps, and a heavily modified tri-amped Belle in the center, which worked pretty well but had slightly too narrow apparent source width (ASW) with the Jubilees on each side. For the first time, however, its timbre actually matched:

Nowadays, it looks much like this (Oct 2016):

Not much visible difference from what it looked like eight years ago now, but a lot of tweaking has occurred since that didn't change the visual presence, i.e., phase flattening/time alignment all the way around, no passive crossovers and fully multi-amped. Since then, the TV got bigger (77" OLED) and the surround AMT-1s on top of the Belle surrounds are now two-high. The PS3 and the carpet are gone, the dog pillows are now much smaller to be able to wash them, and the turntable and First Watt F3 in the garden window to the left are still hidden by the curtains. The center changed from the heavily modified tri-amped Belle to the K-402-MEH (prototype).

How does it sound? To answer that, you'll have to come listen. I've spent a lot of time sitting in the left reclining chair since, and I'm pretty much satisfied. It only took ~15 years to get it where I originally wanted it to sound like on day one. With the right recordings (e.g., multichannel SACDs) it can sound really close to the real thing, IMO.

A description of what's there and including room acoustics and genres of music in my ripped digital music library:
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/members/cask05.73439/about

Chris

 

[Morpheus]

DIY to 20hz or lower in a small-ish closure - you got my attention!

I think I saw a sub closure design something like if not the same on Pinterest. What driver or specs for the same get things started?

Thanks

For info start here
lautsprechershop.de/hifi/ridtahler_en.htm

For my RiPol I used two Monacor SPH-390TC
Sub setup is via MiniDsp (80hz) and Antimode for equalization and a Emotiva amp with 4x 170W.
RiPols have low efficiency factor. If you will hear very loud you need two or four of them but for normal home use one will be enough.

William

 

[MoreJoy21]

10 years ago I would have had 7.1 surround sound system Onkyo speakers Epson powerlite 8350 projector with a 98" image, a pioneer 7.1 AVR along with time PlayStation 3, Xbox one, a small physical media collection of less than 30 blu-rays and a dish Network satellite HD beatbox. Today I have a 65-in OLED, 5.2 Andrew Jones pioneer speakers powered by a marantz swim line 5.1 AVR a Panasonic UB820, an Xbox One S 2TB and a Roku ultra. My disk collection of Blu-ray and 4K blu-rays has grown to over 420 and internet service has gone from cable Internet to fiber. That's a great question and really made me think back to what I had and what I have now. I'm currently wiring my media area to have a 5.4.2 Atmos system and will upgrade my AVR to accommodate those needs as well as a larger OLED TV in the '77 to 83 in range hopefully within the next 3 years.