Initial Impressions
Okay, I'll update the saga of my 8th Nerve treatment journey. A ways back I bought 4 x Adapt corners during the big summer clearance. I will frankly admit they performed well out of proportion to their size & my expectations. The cost seemed high to a cheapskate like me, at least before I bought them! But now I see I was a fool to wait so long.
So how do I follow up on this gain? By adding some more 8th Nerve products!
Again the cheapskate in me rules the day- I readily acknowledge the excellence of the Adapts, but as much as I'd like to complete the rest of the room with Adapts it's a bit beyond my budget right now. My thumbnail sketch indicates I'd need 7 Rectangles at a cool $1400...probably well worth it, but a bit over my budget. So I went the used route & bought a package of used Response treatments, 10 seams & 5 corners, from a real solid fellow AC'er who moved up to all-Adapts (thanks, Gongos
).
Thanks to an abundance of product, I have actually treated every trihedral corner in my room, including the floor/corner/wall junction and all of the dihedrah corners- including the floor/wall spots. The ceiling/wall areas are treated with Adapts, with the balance being treated with Response's.
I've only had them up for six hours, so I'll reserve in depth commentary for a later time, but my initial impressions are very favorable- basically I get even more of what I had: a lack of overhang, less ringing, more clarity. The room doesn't seem to "hang onto" bass notes like it did, obliterating the "overhang" & boom that I had. How do those little things work effectively as bass treatments? Scratch Head I dunno, but I will trust the combo of my ears & my Rat Shack SPL meter! Objectively the response is much smoother. Subjectively, my room sounds larger, less clostrophobic. There's "speed" and "lean-ness" I've never heard in this room before. But that lean, clean sound doesn't equate to a thin bass- quite the contrary. It seems a layer of gunk is peeled off the bass, leaving a potency I haven't had since I moved in. And I haven't even connected my parametric EQ yet!
Kudos to Nathan & Co. I'll post more after I live with the products for awhile.
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Update:
My initial impressions were posted last year. It was requested that I update my experiences with the 8th Nerve products, and having lived with them for a year all my first impressions have been reinforced. I recently moved to a larger house and have added an ACEi SOS parametric sub EQ to the mix. Well, after much of a year in the old system and my time with them in the new place I can safely say they're no fluke. Compared to the untreated room I can hear much further into the mix. Details are much more readily apparent now- for example, often backing and harmony vocal parts that were somewhat homogenous and obscure can now very clearly be heard as overdubs by the lead vocalist.
I still don't know why or how they improve the bass.
They definately do, even though it seems not to fit with my understanding of how sound works. I'm left to conclude that Nathan is on to something with regards to his theories of laminar flow and horn loading of trihedrah corners.
Recently I have decided to add some other products to the mix, too, as well as try some heavy duty bass trapping in my new basement HT room. It's been suggested that using some Adapts and some traps might yeild better results than either one alone. I will probably experiment with this in months to come. aa
