Wayne paid me a visit today to set up my VMPS Larger Sub and room treatment.  I wanted to share a quick review of the remarkable improvements wrought by the Bolder Guy and quality products from Circle manufacturers.

List of goodies:

VMPS Larger Sub in Piano Black.
Marchand XM44 XO  with Bolder Mods: Nitro wire, Bybees, Power supply power cord etc.
Enough 8th Nerve treatment for the listening room and a toublesome hallway.
Bybee power bar.
Nitro interconnects and speaker wire for XO, amp and sub.
Monster HTS7000 balanced power and line conditioner-- mods by Bolder, with Acme Cryo outlets Bolder Nitro wire and a half dozen Bybees and Nitro Power Cord.

I have a pristine Aragon 4004 MkII amp that Wayne used for the install to power the VMPS.

Observations:  Yeah, I know the stuff needs time for breakin, but Wayne has run the stuff in some and the rest of my system has lots of hours.  So, with that caveat, here are my impressions.  Detail.  With the 8th Nerve tamming reflections and the XO removing low frequencies from the lower midrang-upper bass the detail is clean and clear and reveals layers I honestly never heard on discs I am very familiar with.  This is not detail of the hyped or etched variety, it's the detail you hear in a club, live.  I have complained about the upper midrange and lower treble being rough.  Not anymore.  

If you think this is just a guess about the roughness, you would be wrong.  Wayne measured the room response before and after and indeed the peaks were there before but not after the room treatment.

Bass is powerful, but overly tight until the drivers breakin.  However I put  onthe Gladiator soundtrack and the bass was shocking.  Well integrated and fast.  Quite amazing for such large drivers.  BC does it again.  With the RM40s JC-1s and the sub the dynamics are absolutely astounding.   What is now apparent and was lacking to some degree was that special involvement that emotionally draws me into the music.  At last it is there.  

Last quick point.  The Marchand XO is a wonder.  It's uh, not the most beautiful black box I have seen, but it is sooo... transparent.  I have always avoided additional electronics in the chain, but a quick change, at least at this point, seems to yield the result that nothing additional is there!    

After 2 to 3 weeks I will try and pass on what I hear.  My basement is full of bad purchases.  I will not live with a piece of equipment if it sucks in the long run, I don't care what I paid for it.  So my ego does not come into play because I made a purchase( my son has my Martin Logan Prodigys, my ex wife my JM lab Mini Utopias and REL subs and enough electronics, wire and cable to start a second hand store.)  I am entirely open to criticism and have the receipts to prove it.  So believe me when I say that if this gets better and I am sure it will, I will be happy for a good long time, for the first time in a very long time.
     
Well done Wayne.  Chime in please.

So, when do I get to come over  We could bring jason and have another tuning party  

Maybe you could post what the rest of the system is so others can have a reference for what (high) level your gear is at.

Chris,

The Marchand XM-44 retails in stock form for $800.00 assembled.

With the mods, all internal wire NITRO, silver plated IEC and AC Fuse holder, Bybees on input jacks and including a NITRO power cable, you are looking at $1,000.00.

I picked up an ICBM some time ago. I opened it up and looked at the components used to make it and and put it back in the box. It would cost more to mod that thing than to make the Marchand. It probably wouldn't sound as good either.

Turk's system starts with a Sony XA-777ES with a NITRO power cable. He has a Mensa Plus DI/O connected to it through a Napalm digital cable. He uses Silver Bullet Bybee Nitro interconnect cable into a Van Alstine preamp. The front end components are plugged into the modified Monster Cable HTS-7000. He uses Silver Bullet NITRO interconnects from the preamp to the XO. From the XO are more Silver Bullet NITRO interconnects into a pair of Parasound JC-1s with Bybee NITRO Plus power cables and the Aragon amp for the VMPS Larger sub with Megawoofer and Soundcoat. Speaker wires for the sub are NITRO. Into a pair of TRT capped, FRS RM-40s, he uses  Bybee NITRO speaker wire with Bybee NITRO jumpers. His listening room is treated with Eighth Nerve corners and seams. The XO and the sub amp are plugged into a Bybee power box. He has two dedicated 20 amp lines with ACME Audio outlets for his power amps and a separate dedicated line for the front end components.

I set the levels for the subs and tuned the rest of the system slightly with the True RTA program running on Mike Galusha's laptop. As he mentioned the inroom responce was flat to 14 HZ.

As Turk says, it still needs some break in, but he has some of the best dynamics and impact of ANY system I have ever heard. The system sounded wonderful the last time the DAM were over his place. The next time we get together there, I expect even Tyson and Jason might like what they hear

 Ok I go to answer and I find the answer.  Lesson learned, if you take 20 minutes because of 3rd grade typing skills , better check the posts  to see if the question's already been  answered.  Wayne's is much better anyway.