A customer from the early days of VMPS called me last week. He had moved into a condo and of necessity had found a home for his 27 year old STIIa/R's in a music store, swapping speakers, turntable and amp for a restored 1901 Henry H Miller upright. He had been using some highly regarded, expensive compact standmounts (brand shall not be mentioned) with an equally expensive 15" servo sub and was not happy. He thought the RM2 might serve better but wanted an inhome demo.
This man is a multiple Grammy-winning producer with credits including Howlin Wolf and Clapton, so I decided to give his setup personal attention. As a bonus, he lives about half an hour from our factory, so the trip would not be too strenuous. Associated gear was high end but at the reasonable level--a pair of $2000 power amps and a $2500 CD player. Since he could biamp I decided on the SDE version of the RM2 which offers a lot of flexibility.
The existing system stood between a large LCD TV in a completely bare room, devoid even carpets or drapes. Subwoofer stood in the front lefthand corner and the standmounts were about 6ft out into the room. The sound was smooth, well balanced, but bass heavy and rather opaque. Still, given the lively acoustic it was a good sound and did well by his classical-and-blues program material.
It took an hour to hook up everything biamped through the DCX2496, which I had preprogrammed for my home environment, a highly treated LEDE. This "standard" program included 6dB of bass channel boost (since the RM2 woofers are considerably less sensitive than the 96dB/1W/1m FST), 4dB of cut at 63Hz to eliminate the floor-to-ceiling (9ft) room mode, 2.9 dB of cut between 1 and 3kHz (Q=2.6 centered at 1.9 kHz) to tame the ribbon mid panel "presence" peak its designer was so fond of (curse you, Dragoslav!), a 220Hz xover at 24dB lowpass and 12dB highpass, and another proprietary EQ which I use to reduce IM distortion. I also ended up cutting the FST treble level 1dB with the speaker level controls which shelved the top octaves down a bit (this turned out easier to do with the Lpads rather than with the active EQ).
My customer favors a very strong bottom end so we left his subwoofer in place with a 50Hz/24dB rollin and a low overall level. Some fiddling with the phase control also helped the blend.
I made many microadjustments of woofer level and EQ settings, but the end result was stunning: a completely natural frequency balance from 20Hz to 20kHz with outstanding tonal quality and a transparenency that allowed extraordinary listening through the music right back into the hall. Both customer and designer were very pleased.
Goes to show: the small adjustments available with our digital crossover and EQ (which sounded very non-electronic when we were done) can overcome the problems of an undamped environment and give listening pleasure beyond that available from the flattest, low-distortion speakers (which he already had) because the room can be "dialed out" with a just good ear and a few clicks. No, we used no test equipment.
Go SDE, young man. It's a recipe for success.
