Thought I would update this thread with my setup/listening experience from this past weekend now that I have things up and running. This is an e-mail I sent to some audio friends of mine.........
Well the Rythmik sub is up and running in my system and as I told mchuckp yesterday in another e-mail, I have no plans to remove it from the system and think it was a wise investment. Sorry for another long write up, but thought you'd like to know my experience thus far.
As you may recall, things didn't start out so hot on Thursday night when I went to hook things up for the first time. Getting the sub outta the box and put where I wanted wasn't so tough other than trying to get it through my garage door into my family room. Box was pretty wide and at almost 65lbs it was a little tough to finesse. Eventually got it into the listening room/family room though and got it out of the box. Fit and finish were really impressive. Granted, it's not a Salk speaker, but for their flat black look I was impressed as there were no scratches or dents shown and the finish was smooth to the touch. At this point, I was still expecting a silver driver and I was surprised when I popped off the grill and found an aluminum black driver. Not sure what the deal was with Ascend and Rythmik on communication, but clearly they didn't do a good job of it on this order. In the end though I got what I originally ordered so that made me happy. The F12 comes with a nice set of spiked feet and some small metal disks that the spikes can sit in if you want the sub raised on spikes, but you don't want the spikes scratching or digging into your wood flooring. The Rythmik doesn't come with a lot of instructions (rather a one page sheet), but that wasn't a huge deal as I had been reading up on the various settings anyway and had some help from fellow AC'ers as to what it all meant
Put it down between my TV stand and my right speaker and plugged it in to a spare wall outlet. To my delight, I didn't get any hum or strange noises coming out the amp so I was good to go as far as ground loops.
Next up was the SMS-1. This proved to be a bit more tricky that evening. First of all, this is a half size component meaning it's as wide as a typical component, but only half as deep. I have no idea why manufacturers do this crap, but for those of us who stack components it's a HUUUUUUGE PITA. Needless to say, in order for me to stack it with the rest of my gear, I now have some of my kids Legos holding up the back half of my DVD player and cable box. Hopefully I can find something at HD or Lowes to replace those in time. Then as I eluded to on Friday, it was interconnect hookup time. One pair to my AVA T8 to feed the test tones, one pair from the second output of the T8 back to the SMS-1, one RCA to my TV, one set to the sub and then a power plug. Even the power plug was kinda a pain because it's one of those deals where they don't use a standard size plug coming out the unit, but rather one of those small little 3.5 mm jacks that plugs into a cube looking thing that then has a regular plug coming out of it. Big ol' waste of space. Anyway, got all that hooked up and then hooked up some FMOD's for high frequency cut off up between the T8 and my amp. Next I turned on the TV and switched to the input which was for the SMS-1 and was shown the main screen. Thought to myself, I'm good to go now
Pushed 890 on the remote to reset the unit and then 12345 to get to the test tone screen. (Oh I had plugged the mic in by now as well and put it in my LP. Definitely a quality looking mic by the way.) Now the sub was playing test tones and I could see the frequency curves of the sub coming up on my TV. Sweet! Wait a minute.......why are my mains not playing? This left me scratching my head and checking all of my IC's to make sure I didn't screw something up. Even after turning up the volume on my T8 to the 12 o'clock position, I was getting nothing out of the ST's. Hmmm. Took a time out and tried to gather my thoughts as to what the heck I was doing wrong. It escapes my memory as to what I did to get the ST's to start playing tones, but it was a, "I could have had a V8" moment for sure. At this point I level matched the mains to the sub and it was at this point that I noticed I had a HUUUUUUUUUUGE bass peak at 38 to 40 hz. Hit 321 on the remote to see what the SMS-1 would do on auto EQ mode. It read the curve and then adjusted the EQ's to suite. Kinda cool. However, I didn't end up going with this as the auto EQ tried to pump up certain nulls by adding gain to those frequencies which I had read is a no no. I've read and had been told that you don't want to try adding gain to nulls, but really are much safer in trying to pull down peaks. I then readjusted the EQ to pull down those added gains and gave a quick listen to a couple tracks of music. Things sounded pretty decent, but being that it was getting pretty late I decided to call it a night and do some additional tweaking in the following days.
Thursday night was a wash as my wife decided that she would cut coupons and watch lame TV even after I had asked her earlier in the day if I could mess with the stereo again that evening. Sigh..........
Friday night I got back into it again and decided to try and do a little manual EQ'ing. This is when I started noticing some strange things and had to enlist the help of a fellow AC'er familiar with these things via a phone call. Early in the evening I had sent this member some pictures of my first curves for his comments and suggestions. I had sent him two curves, one with sub on and one without. When I got to looking at the one without the sub engaged, this is when I really started wondering if something was broken or not working with my FMOD's as I assumed they were supposed to cut off low frequencies below 80 hz to the mains. In looking at my curve, there were DEFINITELY tones being played below 80 hz and there was that HUGE bass peak at about 40hz. This left me scratching my head as I thought the FMOD's would basically send the frequency response curves plunging off a cliff under 80hz. This is when I pulled the FMOD's and tried to hook up the 80hz high pass filter available in the SMS-1. Lo and behold, after doing that the curves looked about the same as with the FMOD's. This is when I placed a call because I couldn't understand why the ST's continued to show low end on the graph even though I could clearly hear a reduction in low end when playing CD's with the FMOD's installed and without the sub. In talking with my AC friend, apparently even though the FMOD's or the SMS-1 have high frequency filters, they both have relatively shallow slopes for cutoff. This means that low end is still played through your mains, but at a reduced decible level. This was kinda a bummer for me as it meant that I was going to have to just deal with that huge 40hz bass peak and it wasn't something that I could EQ out as it was coming from my ST's and the room interaction. The AC'er I was speaking with has the same problems in a long wall setup like mine. This AC friend reassured me that it wasn't THAT big of a deal as by EQ'ing the other frequencies around it I'd still have flatter bass response overall than what I had experienced previously. It was at this point he also noticed that my curve with the sub engaged had a mighty big drop off below 30hz in terms of DB's. That's when he mentioned that I needed to turn the gain of the sub up in order to get the lowest frequencies up to around 76db (which was where I was trying to flat line things to). I initially thought this was going to create boomy easily localized bass, but I figured this guy has done this before and knows more than I do so I'd be wise to give it a shot. Again, it was getting late in the evening so I didn't try out any of his suggestions that evening, but figured I could do them on Saturday being that my wife was heading out shopping with a friend for a few hours in the afternoon and I'd have the place to myself.
So Saturday afternoon arrives and I once again fire up the system with the mic in the LP and the test tones playing. First thing I do is turn up the sub amp to get the lowest frequencies up to that 76db level. Things are vibrating pretty good in the room
Then I set about the task of manually EQ'ing for what I'm seeing going on in the graph. There are a couple of small peaks going on at 22hz and 26hz (roughly) that I try and pull down. I know the 40hz mountain peak can't be pulled down much so I try to just smooth out the frequencies around it and make it more of a peak than a plateu which it previously had been. Played around with EQ settings for about an hour and just started to become frustrated as I couldn't get things as smooth as I wanted. This wasn't a fault of the SMS-1, but rather my lack of experience in dealing with EQ'ing in general and being able to change not only the frequency the EQ slider bar represented, but also what Velodyne calles the 'Q' of that slider bar which is basically how much of the freqency range you are affecting by moving that bar. It was at this point that I said to myself that I was going to waste the entire afternoon EQ'ing and not doing any music listening which is where the rubber meets the road so to speak. I called it 'good enough' and pulled the mic and fired up some music.
Ok, mchuckp asked me yesterday if all I played through the system on Saturday was bass heavy tracks. My answer was that initially I did because I wanted to see what low end I was missing with the ST's in some stuff that I knew had more low end available in what I had heard through my Denon headphones. This included stuff like Infected Mushroom, the TRON soundtrack, James Blake, Eryka Badu, Blue Man Group and even Dido. The Rythmik did not disappoint in this area and delivered a nice chunk of low end to the music. Now when I say nice chunk, I'm not talking about teeth rattling, floor shaking or plumbing the depths of Mordor bass that distracts you from the rest of the music. I just meant that there was more low end then I was hearing before. HOWEVER, what impressed me was that this low end sounded completely natural like it was coming from the ST's and it wasn't able to be localized to the sub. Mid bass was punchy and fast (IM is a good test for this) and right in the center of the soundstage like it had always been. However, the really low end just came out of nowhere like you would expect low end should. It was duing the playing of IM that I also noticed just how much more added detail I was getting. The AC'er who helped me through this EQ'ing process mentioned to me that this would be a great side effect of using the sub with the ST's crossed over at a higher frequency because the ST's were no longer required to play the lower bass region at as high of a DB level. Bells and chimes were just marvelous sounding. Threw in some Porcupine Tree and was shocked at how clear Gavin Harrison's drums became. Not only did I have the sweet mid bass like I always got from the ST's, but I was able to CLEARLY pick out the double bass work he was doing with his feet as well. No, this wasn't one note bass by any stretch and it was FAST. Through all of this I never felt like the bass was overtaking the rest of the music or dominating the presentation. Music just sounded more full of body for lack of a better description. I've always loved the song Piano Smasher from Blue Man Group and now with the Rythmik it just takes it to a whole new level in my listening space.
After an hour or more of playing through bass heavy tracks, I decided to switch over to stuff that I didn't think would really benefit much from the incorporation of a sub or might even sound worse. This was stuff like Alison Krauss, Diana Krall, Vienna Teng and guitar from Tommy Emmanuel and Nils Loftgren. This is where that added detail showed itself once again. Things just sounded clearer and zippier (is that a word?) than they did previously. The plucking of strings and what not. Lots of times, I wasn't sure if the sub was even playing so I had to go up to it and put my hand on the driver to feel for movement. Sure enough, it was there, but it blended so seamlessly I never would have thought it was playing at all. Through all of this, I played around with different toe in settings and again, I keep coming back to zero to barely any toe in being the best for my particular room and setup. With the added detail the ST's were playing and the soundstage of the speakers straight out into the room, I was getting some really cool turn your head kinda moments.
Well that's enough for now........hope you fellers found this to be interesting reading and feel free to fire away with any questions. I'm no sub expert, but I certainly see where having one can be an advantage to a system now.
