UPDATE: 7/30/23
A lot of things have coalesced since moving the speakers to the West end of the room where they can breath.
![](https://www.decware.com/newsite/images/dfh10west.png)
Right now I have things dialed in and the sound stage is 20 feet behind the speakers, which would be 15 feet behind the curtain. The focus is uncanny.
The bass
First thing noticed after moving the speakers to this end of the room was the imaging, but then very quickly it was the bass. The hole seems to be gone. This is like a gift that I wasn't anticipating and I am so grateful! Holy crap is it nice without the hole.
I believe much of my concern about the bass of these speakers may have come by unique circumstance. I have full size horns on the West end of the room designed for bass only. They are not being used, and have been successfully designed not to sympathetically resonate with the other speakers in the room, but... while that has been true for the past 20 years, I have never actually built a giant pair of similar horns and placed them on the opposite end of the room and fired them directly at each other... It's probable that when the speakers were on the East end of the room the hole was created by an interaction with the horns at the West end of the room. This makes sense now, because none of the smaller speakers I have create a bass null at the listening position.
Frequency Balance
The raw character of these speakers is to be insanely articulate and a bit forward by themselves. When I moved them to the other end of the room I wondered if that would change. It did not. Well, actually IT DID! I was frankly stunned, because I couldn't figure out how that was possible, but they sounded nicely staged back with good depth and weren't forward sounding. Then I realized I had the network for the Lii Song Fast 15 still on the Sarah 300B amp from a previous demo and forgot to take it off. Honestly, I preferred them on, so I listened that way on and off for several days.
The overall balance on this end of the room is far better because there is even weight throughout the bass regions, so really it's just about getting it to layer back and get the 3D space of the sound stage perfectly balanced.
The Gizmo2
I am really starting to love this thing. I realized I like the HDT better with the Gizmo2 when I accidentally left it on one day when switching speakers. Anyway, I installed the Gizmo2 from the start, but have had it in bypass mode this whole time. I un-bypassed it and things got better still. More separation from front to back in the sound stage. It spent a few days with it using the Fast 15 networks at the same time and found I adjusted the Gizmo 2 to max which means minimal effect.
Later I removed the network and have been listening without it using the Gizmo2 turned all the way up which is to say maximum effect. Lon would like this.
The Amp and Tubes
I got my collection of 300B tubes back from the Steve Guttenberg review and all I had during those several months was the Chinese tube I found that I liked and that we offer to ship with the amps. I can say with confidence that the tube doesn't suck. Especially after hearing it on these speakers. The dynamics are anything but weak and the sound is beautiful. It is so good in fact that it made me forget about the Western Electrics that I sent out for review for at least a couple of months or more before I began to wonder what they sounded like...
So the other day I popped in my Western Electrics during the middle of a listening session kind of wondering what I would hear change and as soon as I turned up the volume there was a sanctity in my listening space that just made me gasp and then stand there in amazement at the difference in transparency... so that was fun.
The Cables
This is where it gets kind of interesting...
I am driving the amplifier with a single pair of DECWARE RCA interconnects from the ZBIT to the Sarah 300B amplifier. Feeding the ZBIT is DECWARE XLR cable from the Cambridge CXNv2.
Since it was only a single 1 meter pair of RCA I used a prototype cable I got from Lii Song that had a slightly silkier sound I thought might compliment these horns. After going back and forth for a few days I was convinced the cable is a notch above our own cables.
Then it was time to introduce a ZROCK to see how using a different approach to regulating forwardness by pushing or pulling back the image compares to the Gizmo2... or at least that was the plan.
Since I had to add an additional set of interconnects to make the ZROCK2 a reality, and since I didn't want to mess with what I already had, I set the ZROCK up on the second set of inputs, so I went from a single 1 meter cable to a pair, and just to mess with my head, both were actually 2 meter cables.
At this point I found the textured silky transparency and sound stage of the Lii cable from the ZBIT better than the sound from the ZROCK going through the other cables. I became convinced the presentation was better without the ZROCK and long lengths of cables. I blamed it on the cables.
ZROCK3
I have been developing a ZROCK3 because I have been refining and improving the ZROCK for the past several months. Now was a good time to test it. The above results that I blamed on the cables I also blamed on the the new ZROCK3 that had no burn-in time on it.
After a couple days of using it and going back and forth, I decided to take advantage of one of the bigger new features of the ZROCK3 which is a variable output level. I wanted to match the gain exactly with the ZBIT so I could A/B things a little more seriously. After adjusting it down to match other input everything completely changed for the better. I was actually stunned. The layering and depth, and focus and everything I love about a ZROCK was there but it sounds as transparent or more so. It was such a game changer for the sound stage. It is set to about 10:00 A.M. so the EQ hasn't kicked in yet. I have never been able to listen to a ZROCK at this position before, or perhaps I could have, but never wanted to.
By being adjusted into nearly perfectly flat response and at unity gain relative to the other input from the ZBIT which itself was set to unity gain at 2 volts, the layers have been just coming into focus and getting deeper and deeper as we go.
Now, I am hearing the sound focus, timbre, layers, depth and transparency are all better than before when not using the ZROCK. So this completely vaporized my observation/suspicions that the cables were a big reason why I initially didn't like the ZROCK in the path.
Anyway, the ZROCK3 dialed back to unity and the GIZMO2 are the only things being used to make these speakers a new reference for sound stage. They are like the House speakers but bigger and faster and more visceral in the bass.
After dark, even the most delicate music has immense density and dynamics and decay. Hell, you can be mesmerized on these things listening to elevator music.
Anyway, what started this thread was the insane imaging and sound stage depth that came as a result of all this experimenting which came as a result of moving the speakers to the other side of the room where there is lots of space around and behind them. Because of the difference in depth resolution this brought it was suddenly easy to hear differences and I became motivated to explore it. On the East end of the room the idea would have never presented itself, and didn't.
So this years DECFEST will be a lot of fun having something new to hear. I'm thinking about having attendees sign a release form before hearing them. This is no doubt the best demo in the Decware listening room to date. It is much like the large open baffles in size and scale, but with razor sharp focus and imaging that just has me shaking my wrecked head.
The Gizmo2, the ZROCK, the impedance switches on the amp and the sound stage switch on the amp along with tubes in the amp all finding their synergistic part in the play have created a virtual experience that exactly replicates the physical experience of getting a tonearm mechanically dialed in to a specific cartridge. So picture a super high end cartridge where the tonearm wasn't ideal, the azimuth a touch off, the wrong mass, the vta set too high and this is what comes from the factory. You haven't heard the cartridge yet. Get it dialed in and holy cow. Lii Song driver in this horn, same thing.
Steve