Dont mussunderstand me please, the tact is awsome. I do all my listening in bypass mode to compare the jolida and the tact.
I have them hooked up like this.
CDP-Tact-Jolida-Krell
I still use the tact as a room corrector and volume controll, but not as a preamp. I will try out more later, but i am tired now and will stop untill the treatments are in.
-Flo
If you prefer the sound in bypass mode to correction you don't have it set up properly. Trust me, I did the same thing at first. In bypass mode, the RCS will lose out to most other good preamps unless you use a digital source and the TacT digital amps with it.
Here are tsome steps to getting a good correction.
1. Spend lots of time moving the speakers and measuring, trying to get the dips minimized. This took me about a week! Sometimes 1/4" makes a difference. I did generally find that positions that measured good sounded good too. And in positions where there was a big node or suckout, it was audible if I listened carefully for it. My critical listening skills improved dramatically during that very long week.
2. Don't try to lift the suck outs much, if at all, with the correction curve. If the measurement curve falls below the target, lower it either in the area of the dip or overall. With sensitive speakers like VMPS driven by powerful amps you can drop the target curve so that hits the bottoms of the peaks. So what you are doing is attenuating other frequencies to some degree while maintaing full output where the suckouts are, thus achieving a smooth target response. With VMPS and solid state (or big tube) amps this seems to work fine in normal sized rooms. Downside is you give up some maximum SPL, but really who needs a system that can play at 120dB anyway ? Better off droping max SPL to 105-110 dB and achieving a flat response. This is not compression, unless you normally are listening at 120dB and if so you'll fry your ears so none of this matters.
3. SPL will be lower with correction than bypass, since correction works by attenuation frequencies. When you compare bypass with correction, don't forget to be very careful about level matching -- you will be turning up the volume with correction enabled. You may need change levels to -6dB or less in the bypass to make up for the difference. I thought correction sounded like crap until I realized this.
4. You may notice an apparent reduction in bass with correction on. This is because the bass reinforcement nodes are gone. What you are left with is the true bass in the recording. Gone is the "one note bass" at 50hz which is your room adding 10dB or more to the output in that range. Classical piano sounds great with correction as all the lower register fundamentals are correct -- makes the piano sound like it is in the room!
I strongly believe that ANY speaker can benefit greatly from room correction. It is very unlikely that any system I have in the future will be without it.
