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Placement is everything. My initial reaction to the Velodynes was good but as my earlier review shows, I was just not fully satisfied after several hours of trying to reach the top performance peak I was looking and hoping for. After my somewhat disappointing audition of the Velodyne 10’s I became a little discouraged and needed to take a break. With a little friendly pressure from my good buddy Nicholas and after a good night’s rest I went at it with a fresh mind… today the story changes.
Time/phase/alignment is important to me. I simply can’t put my subs in the back corner 6 feet behind the mains. As I found out yesterday, I can’t put them next to the mains either. Where I can put them is next to the wall at 10 feet from the front wall as the picture in the next post shows. That changed everything. I tried facing them toward me but that distorted the response too much. Parallel with the side wall and facing toward the back wall worked beautifully. As you can see the frequency response smoothed out wonderfully and the subs are 12 feet from my ears while my mains are 13 feet. They’re closer to me than my mains by 1 foot. That solves the timing issue.
One of the most disturbing things yesterday was an audible slap/vibration noise coming from the subs when driving moderately. As I moved around the room though, the sound would tend to disappear. Very frustrating. As I have come to realize, the subs simply are not happy in front of you while facing straight at your sitting position. There new location has completely eliminated that anomaly.
After discovering all of this I became reinvigorated to give her another go. So after pulling out the old Yamaha receiver and connecting all necessary speakers, subs and big screen LCD, I was off to the tweak heaven. The following is the description of the pictures by pic name from left to right.
800D R - The 800D pic shows just the right channel main without sub support. This seems to be typical in my room when bas is placed where the mains are.
Velo no EQ - shows activating the sub before any EQ adjustment. It’s amazing how it smoothed out that 30hz spike.
Velo EQ right – shows the curve after tweaking. Phase is set at 120 and crossed over at 45hz. I tried the low pass at 40hz but this created 50hz valley that I could not tweak out. I’m ok with 45hz. I little overlap with the 800D is working perfectly fine so far. In fact it seems better. I feel the flat line response is more true to what the recording engineer’s desire was for us to hear. As long as I don’t find myself experiencing bloat of any kind I will be fine with it. So far I don’t detect any.
800D L – shows almost identical response as the 800D Right channel.
Velo EQ left – shows after EQ’d.
After all was setup I sat down to have a listen. The first thing I did was put in Prong, Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck. This recording will challenge a system in the sense that it should play bass drum with authority. However the recording is actually a bit bass shy so to get the full impact of this track the system has to be exactly right. Once I heard that double bass kick drum like it was right here in my room, I know I had scored a home run. The 10’s were doing it. They were actually rising to the occasion. It was beautiful.
But now comes the real challenge for a true and accurate sub, Chesky’s Audiophile Vocal Recordings disc.
The song Fever on track 8 featuring Valerie Joyce is a breathtaking tune for soft Jazz. The stand up Bass is one of my reference points.
So here’s the deal. If I can integrate a sub into my system and get the kick drum realism from Prong and also keep that stand up bass image intact on Fever, then I know the sub is high quality and the room is equalized. At least enough for me.
Well, if it hadn’t worked you would have not sensed the enthusiasm from me thus far. Yes, it worked. In fact it worked so well, I got the goose bumps. I love it when that happens. It’s a sure sign of success.
As for a larger sub, I’m not sure if it would help. It’s possible the 12’s or 15’s may do better but I don’t have the money right now to try them. But I feel fairly confident that the 10’s may have brought me what I was looking for. An unobtrusive, extremely accurate integration with a measure of slam that brings my system closer to the real thing.
Time/phase/alignment is important to me. I simply can’t put my subs in the back corner 6 feet behind the mains. As I found out yesterday, I can’t put them next to the mains either. Where I can put them is next to the wall at 10 feet from the front wall as the picture in the next post shows. That changed everything. I tried facing them toward me but that distorted the response too much. Parallel with the side wall and facing toward the back wall worked beautifully. As you can see the frequency response smoothed out wonderfully and the subs are 12 feet from my ears while my mains are 13 feet. They’re closer to me than my mains by 1 foot. That solves the timing issue.
One of the most disturbing things yesterday was an audible slap/vibration noise coming from the subs when driving moderately. As I moved around the room though, the sound would tend to disappear. Very frustrating. As I have come to realize, the subs simply are not happy in front of you while facing straight at your sitting position. There new location has completely eliminated that anomaly.
After discovering all of this I became reinvigorated to give her another go. So after pulling out the old Yamaha receiver and connecting all necessary speakers, subs and big screen LCD, I was off to the tweak heaven. The following is the description of the pictures by pic name from left to right.
800D R - The 800D pic shows just the right channel main without sub support. This seems to be typical in my room when bas is placed where the mains are.
Velo no EQ - shows activating the sub before any EQ adjustment. It’s amazing how it smoothed out that 30hz spike.
Velo EQ right – shows the curve after tweaking. Phase is set at 120 and crossed over at 45hz. I tried the low pass at 40hz but this created 50hz valley that I could not tweak out. I’m ok with 45hz. I little overlap with the 800D is working perfectly fine so far. In fact it seems better. I feel the flat line response is more true to what the recording engineer’s desire was for us to hear. As long as I don’t find myself experiencing bloat of any kind I will be fine with it. So far I don’t detect any.
800D L – shows almost identical response as the 800D Right channel.
Velo EQ left – shows after EQ’d.
After all was setup I sat down to have a listen. The first thing I did was put in Prong, Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck. This recording will challenge a system in the sense that it should play bass drum with authority. However the recording is actually a bit bass shy so to get the full impact of this track the system has to be exactly right. Once I heard that double bass kick drum like it was right here in my room, I know I had scored a home run. The 10’s were doing it. They were actually rising to the occasion. It was beautiful.
But now comes the real challenge for a true and accurate sub, Chesky’s Audiophile Vocal Recordings disc.
The song Fever on track 8 featuring Valerie Joyce is a breathtaking tune for soft Jazz. The stand up Bass is one of my reference points.
So here’s the deal. If I can integrate a sub into my system and get the kick drum realism from Prong and also keep that stand up bass image intact on Fever, then I know the sub is high quality and the room is equalized. At least enough for me.
Well, if it hadn’t worked you would have not sensed the enthusiasm from me thus far. Yes, it worked. In fact it worked so well, I got the goose bumps. I love it when that happens. It’s a sure sign of success.
As for a larger sub, I’m not sure if it would help. It’s possible the 12’s or 15’s may do better but I don’t have the money right now to try them. But I feel fairly confident that the 10’s may have brought me what I was looking for. An unobtrusive, extremely accurate integration with a measure of slam that brings my system closer to the real thing.
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