[aevans]

Got just about the best deal in my life over at audiogon. Mejor supreme with deqx and amp all together as a package. Anyone interested in my gallenas and some big class a amps?

Mejor and his friends should be here Thursday, I'll
post my thoughts when I get a break from listening.

[aevans]

Let me start by saying how amazing Rick, the guys at deqx, and the previous owner are. Rick and deqx both treated me as an equal to the original purchaser when I called them. Very personable, easy to get the information I needed to get started. The original owner helped with handling the shipping of over 400 pounds of equipment by bringing it to the shipper of my choice and personally overseeing the packing, well above and beyond for any deal, especially one that was such a good price. 

As for the sound, so far I have just scratched the surface, or a better way to put it may be that I threw a pebble into the ocean. For my first test run, I used the config already loaded, corrected for a different room and using someone elses eq settings. So I'll leave tone out of it for now and stick to the basics of driver dynamics - These speakers are quick, that sums it up - the sound gets to you before you know what is comming. It's crazy fast, the galena has that feeling, but the lower crossover point on the large raal makes the effect sound more complete. I kind of feel sorry for the illuminator woofer as I don't think it's getting used much at all, almost everything is passing though the ribbon. Even deep male vocalist go right to the ribbon. It's crazy. 

The bass is something that sounds loose when it is supposed to, and tight when it needs it. Over all, effortless is the word that fits the bill. The lower end needs lots of tweaking for room correction and I'll be getting to that as soon as I can round up a mic stand. 

The cabinet work is incredible, these things are works of art and the magnetic grills keep getting more ohs and ahs than they reasonably should among adults. 

I'm going to be tweaking this out over the next month getting just what I want from them. I'll update as I go, keeping it real.

[jonbee]

I saw those for sale. I think you got the deal of a lifetime. Have fun!

[satfrat]

 
That is one killer looking loudspeaker,, congrates! 
 
Cheers,
Robin

[aevans]

Got more time to play with the system, let me quickly run down the set up for posterities sake, flac files from my laptop, through a squeeze box out via digital to the deqx, then to an adcom gfa 7707 and out via some cardas wires to the monitors and some 10g copper wire to the subs. 

So I gave the room correction a go, some blue tape on a chair leg propped up on my sofa held the mic in the exact spot where my head goes. Hooked up the computer and figured out what was what. Still need to finish reading the 200 page manual for the deqx, but I was able to edit an existing profile. 

Took the measurement and to my surprise the right channel midrange was not working. Tracked down the problem to my amp, which was the only thing that got messed up with shipping, lucky for me it had an extra channel to hook to, so I moved the mid to the other channel, ran the test again and it worked perfect. 

The room bloom was there right on the graph, 18db gain at 60hz. The only surprise was some spikes in the 300-500hz range everything else was as expected. Switch on auto correct, which btw only touches the bottom 550hz, sat down and was blown away. My impression with just auto correct is that it is very similar to head phones.  It removes the sound of the room, but only for one location at a time. If I sit up, the bass falls flat, walk around the room and you wonder what is wrong with the speakers, sit down in the sweet spot and you are wearing head phones again. I think if I take some more measurements and average the corrections I should be able to get a compromise that can be lived with. 

So after a few tracks of that setup I removed the room correction, eq, and everything to just see how the speakers sound by themselves. This was operating like a passive crossover setup. The sound is amazing, voicing is very similar to the galena's which I still think is one of those speakers that can get you 95% of the way to perfection. The bottom octave is there down to 17hz in room at -10 db and I could correct that to about 10hz with the deqx if I really wanted to get silly. 

So for now I'm just listening to the speakers getting to know them and letting them learn my tunes, once I've got an idea of what I want to change I'll fiddle with that. You should except another update when I get through the manual and try out more of the extreme measures the deqx allows for.