Another set of Alpha's lives!

GaryW · « **on:** 8 May 2004, 08:16 pm »

Could it be that Gary finally finished his set? Yes! Last Saturday at about 11pm. I laugh when Alpha projects are measured in hours. I cut my MDF December of 2001 and started assembly last summer. Just assembling the electronics and the drivers was about 8 hours for the first speaker, 6 for the second. I keep pretty busy with the job and family, though.

They're cherry veneer: 1/4" on the sides, front and top, and 2 ply on the back. For damping, I used a gallon of sound coat, some spray on damping material, and closed foam on the side of the woofer enclosure. The edges of the front and top are 3/4" cherry quarter rounds. Routing the channels for those and getting them flush was probably the toughest piece of assembly. The stain is a beautiful medium red mahogany by solar lux over which are 6 coats of lacquer.

I think they turned out great. Coherence was a bit buggered when I set them up. I had them a little toed in - big mistake. It's about right now for the room, which has no treatments. We're moving in three weeks, so I'll work on placement and room treatments more in the next house. Meanwhile, I've put almost every SACD I own through them: Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Jeff Beck's Blow by Blow, YoYo Ma's Solo, JT's Hourglass, and a few others. They all sound great. A buddy was over this week and said, "Man, it sounds like James Taylor is in the room!" Bingo. Bought Master and Commander on DVD last night and watched with the family. These speakers rock!! The rest of the system is a Curcio Audo Engineering PAS3 preamp, a 300B push-pull amp of my design (you can see it glowing in the middle of the picture of both speakers) fed by a Sony SACD/DVD carousel.

Danny - hat's off again. What a great set of speakers. BTW, we're moving to just outside of Barstow, CA, so maybe we'll see you at CES next year...

See pics posted below.

Marbles · « **Reply #1 on:** 8 May 2004, 08:21 pm »

You can create a gallery and upload them there.

On the top of this page you will see the "Gallery" link.

Then just copy the URL of the picture(s) here.

wshuff · « **Reply #2 on:** 8 May 2004, 10:08 pm »

I've tried to check your pictures but Yahoo says that they aren't there. Hope you set up a gallery. I'm looking forward to seeing your hard work.

GaryW · « **Reply #3 on:** 8 May 2004, 11:23 pm »

Across Living Room

Left speaker

Left front 3/4

Back

Front close-up

vpolineni · « **Reply #4 on:** 8 May 2004, 11:27 pm »

looks great gary... isn't there supposed to be a base for them?

GaryW · « **Reply #5 on:** 8 May 2004, 11:40 pm »

Yes - 'ventually. Kinda outta steam right now - our new house will be 2300 sq ft and our current house is 3300 sq ft. We're in major clean-up, throw out, and donate mode right now. I needed to get those suckers finished so we could move on to other projects.

wshuff · « **Reply #6 on:** 8 May 2004, 11:49 pm »

Hey, if you're throwing those Alphas out let me know your address and I'll give the garbage men a hand. Don't want one of those guys to get hurt trying to dump the things. Just doing my civic duty, you know.

GaryW · « **Reply #7 on:** 9 May 2004, 12:15 am »

Mighty kind of you! If'n the Alphas end up on the curb, I'll let you know. Doubt it though. The wife is actually in love with the sound too. That tells you they're pretty good.

GaryW · « **Reply #8 on:** 9 May 2004, 12:36 am »

If there are any tube-heads out there, here's a picture of the amplifier and schemtics. Good for about 30W per channel. In a good sized living room, seems to be plenty.

azryan · « **Reply #9 on:** 9 May 2004, 08:52 pm »

VERY nice!
Great job. I love that color veneer!

So you found toe-in to not work out for you huh? I know when I first built mine I put them very close together (~7.5') and with almost zero toe-in.

Danny suggested I pull them much farther apart and toe them in directly at center.
I tried it and felt it lost the sharpness of center image so I split the diff. in distance and toe in.

Later though I realized this ~150Hz bump I had was bigger than I was telling myself so I played with placement again and ended up putting 'em about exactly where Danny suggested in the first place and toed in directly to center.

What changed? Well... the speakers were now several months old and the woofers finally getting broken in.
I found the imaging didn't lose anything like it had before and I (almost totally) knocked down that mid bump prob.

Every room's diff. so what worked for me might not work in your room or course (Danny and I happen to have about the same size room so he wasn't just guessing when he suggested I move 'em) but for SURE those woofers will need either a LOT of time playing assorted moderate vol. music... OR a LOT very deep, heavy bass music over less time.

You can see that no woofer hardly has to move when you play damn near anything, so you can imagine how long it takes for the spider/surround to get fully softened up.

As for the bases... I'm sure you can see that even without them you'd have to REALLY try to tip a speaker over.
I think probably a small base maybe an 1.5" on all sides past the speaker would be fine IMO. The HUGE one per the plans is overkill unless you've got some crazy kids running around... and then I'd worry more about then touching the woofers or sticking a pencil into a neo panel or something like that. heh

Congrats on finishing your Alphas. Welcome to the club! hehe

GaryW · « **Reply #10 on:** 10 May 2004, 02:27 am »

Appreciate the feedback.

I'll play with the placement in our new place. Rather than projecting across the width of the room, I think the living room layout will lend itself to projecting across the length, with the speakers a proper distance away from the rear wall. We'll just have to see as we get the furniture in place.

I'll try the toe in after a few months in the new place. The first Alpha plans Danny sent me had the woofers on a plane that was a bit out from the plane of the tweeters. As I recall, Danny said that the woofers needed to be closer to maintain coherence between the woofers and tweeters, so it would make some sense to me that toe in wouldn't sound as good. He may have compensated in the crossover network.

As for the stands, what I think would be really cool is some wrought iron or steel tubing maybe 1-1/2" square in an "X" or "Y" pattern with a pair of castors on two legs to facilitate movement. We have family in San Diego, so maybe on a trip to TJ some weekend...

azryan · « **Reply #11 on:** 10 May 2004, 05:13 pm »

"-As I recall, Danny said that the woofers needed to be closer to maintain coherence between the woofers and tweeters, so it would make some sense to me that toe in wouldn't sound as good. He may have compensated in the crossover network.-"

Ahhh.. yeah. I know they currently have the x-over electrically alligning the drivers but maybe your version is diff.? You did say you got it way back in 2001 right?

I don't know about iron. Isn't that pretty brittle? Maybe steel tubing but metals like that will vibrate a lot. Maybe if you do it like metal tube speaker stands usually do and fill the tubes with something to dampen them up.

An MDF base plate should just be a lot easier I think.

I personally don't think castors will look right, but maybe small ones?
Maybe just go without spikes. Should be easy enough to move them like that. Maybe cover the bottom of a base plate with that teflon sheet stuff you can buy. I'll slide real nice.