H everyone
I have now had the speakers for over two weeks and have been able to run them in and also to play around with various settings.
Initial listening was with a single Tact S2150 digital amp together with corner subs and Tact room-correction. I was impressed with the detail, speed and imaging but felt the speakers were a bit lean in the upper bass-lower mid region. This was suggested by my measurement curves showing a broad dip between 400-750Hz.
I then moved on to biamping, with the digital amp running the woofers and monoblock 170W valve amps feeding the panels/tweeter. Initial results were disappointing. I tried various permutations without effect incl changing pot settings, toe-in etc. I then ran the woofers in negative acoustic phase and the low end filled in very nicely (confirmed on measurements) but the imaging suffered.
Brian then told me how to bypass the inductor on the woofers and I added a third binding post (neg) to the woofer panel which allowed me to easily change between the standard setup and a bypass setup.
I programmed some low-pass digital crossovers into the Tact amp andplayed around with various slopes. I landed up with a LP crossover of about 550 (24dB/octave) and this has worked well.
The overall improvement has been amazing. I spent a good few hours listening yesterday and am very impressed with the sound. The speakers image wide, high and deep. The detail, imaging, speed and focus are the best I have heard in my room.
It has taken some time but the results I am now getting fully justify the risk I took in buying these speakers unheard
There are still some other changes I want to try - I am getting another digital amp to run the panels/tweeter and this will be interesting.
Some lessons I have learnt:
1) Tilting the speakers downward does not seem to improve the sound
2) The sound is "best" when setting the pots to 12 o'clock or only slightly off the vertical - incresing the pot settings makes the sound a bit harsh
3) Toe-in on axis seems to work best in my setup - sweet spot is smaller but the imaging is superb and the width is amazing.
4) Having speaker grills on my have benefit wrt focus amd imaging but I need to experiement more - thus far I have had the grills off all the time but did a bit of listening last night with them on
5) The Tact measurements have helped a lot to clarify problem areas at the listening position. Room-correction with corner-based subs has also improved the sound tremendously.
Some other thoughts:
I suspect that the woofer upgrade may be beneficial - I am only using the woofers between 130-550 but they seem to be a bit "loose".
Capacitor upgrade may also make a difference.
I bought the very basic model as I wanted to limit my investment in case they did not work out for me - If this is the basic sound then I can only imagine what a fully upgraded system might sound like. Brian has designed a superb speaker for a relatively low price although in my setup I have had to do a bit of tweaking. I have tested a lot of "big-name" speakers in my system incl Avantegarde Duos, and the RM30's overall are the best I have heard here (with a few caveats).
Regards
Jose