I hate the thought of having to take these speakers back inside.  Listening to them outside is really hard to describe except to say it magnifies the musics ability to capture you and hold you in a state of serene amazement.

Headphones are required if you want to hear the low end.



https://youtu.be/0zbilmvy0zM

There is more on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRj2qPuQz6zocI19iUtnU3w/

Those who attended DECFEST were all taken as much as I was so the question becomes how to get closer to that sound in my listening room.

The wavefronts in the low end are so large, 25Hz = 45 feet, and start out from a large area vs. a woofer in a box.  The standing waves are almost insurmountable. Bass traps help but I'm not certain it is even possible with the kind of traps one could drag into an existing room.  Nevertheless, after hearing what these horns can do, and what they should sound like, I realized I was going to have to take the bass seriously and do something extreme.

I placed the speakers as wide as possible in the room and fired them at the opposing corners that as some of you will remember contain my corner horns which are flat down to 25Hz or so.  I designed the entire room for those horns.  So what I did is reverse it and turned the horns into active bass traps by running them out of phase as subs and with the channels reversed relative to the actual speakers.  This basically cancels the bass as it hits the corner of the room so it doesn't fold back into the center and create peaks and holes in the response and different frequencies.  The result is a tremendously obvious tightening up of the bass and the complete elimination of the 8dB peak at 60Hz as well as the 7dB hole at 45Hz and the absence of anything below 35Hz.  Now the base is actually flat down to 25Hz and clean.  It sounds like it did outside.

Besides saving Decfest with a second listening room this must be why the Audio Gods made me drag them out there in the first place.  To actually hear them.  They knew I wouldn't be able to stand it once they were inside so they were kind enough to put this wild idea in my head and allowed it to work on the basically the first try.  Nice.

I'll make some videos of this as well, because the videos never lie.  Then we'll have a comparison.  Anyway, they really love the little forbidden solid state experiment, I keep forgetting I'm listening to it.  Really sounds like the tube amps when you put a tube stage/preamp in front of it.







These speakers sound very similar to my 3-ways aka House Speakers shown sitting directly next to them.  Using the same tweeter but with a cup that drops the usable output down to 500Hz we get around not having a 4 inch midrange because we cross it around 500Hz.  This brings a new level of speed to the midrange and keeps the speed the same all the way up to 20KHz, similar to a single full-range driver except way faster.

Frankly I never thought I would hear these horns drop to 25Hz in the listening room without holes.  It's making my face hurt. : )

I will also be trying this with my currently shorted Klipschorn bass cabs. In a million years this would never have occurred to me as a way to improve in room bass response.  Now I need to figure out how to get a feed to a third amp from my CSP3.  

In my case, yes, a third amp will be required.  I need to determine the best way to deliver the signal to this amp.

Thank you, Steve!  

Brian

It would be interesting if you could demo a BACCH setup indoors with these speaker, especially with the P10 driver installed. I wouldn't be surprised if that were the missing link to an absolutely end game setup.