at work most of the time i'm at job sites for theater installations and smart home design stuff, but this weekend we did a really fun music listening system. i thought i'd share because there are a couple really great ideas here that can be of serious benefit, and it wasn't too expensive at all.
the client had a pair of gallo ref 3.1's. he purchased them for his living room; they were being fed from the zone b output of his mcintosh mht-200 receiver, a denon 3910 player and about 100ft of 20 yr old speaker wire that went through the house and was installed when the home was built. we had just finished up renovating his home theater area, but he and his wife spent most of their time in another room that has breathtaking views of the gulf of mexico...frankly i would too
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we had told him he wasn't going to get the full potential out of the speakers with the setup he had. we agreed that we should install them, let them break in, and he can listen to them for a few months and decide for himself....if they were going to be good enough for him then there was no reason to worry.
fast forward a few months. sure enough...sam (the client) wasn't satisfied with the sound quality of the gallos. his complaint was specifically "they sound nice but it is just not involving". sam also has a pair of these of old monster infinity beta ribbons in his game room that he's been spoiled by for twenty years (we tried to convince the wife to let him have them in the living room but there was no winning that battle). he was also tired of constantly needing to go to the next room to change discs...(there is a mcintosh keypad in the wall to adjust volume and tracks).
ok...enough background...let's get on to the fun stuff
. phishing new speaker wires through the walls is impossible without a lot of construction work and painting...not an acceptable option to sam. instead, we ended up running 4 x 14/2 jamo speaker from the family room *outside* of the house. we cut a hole in the side of the house and dug small a trench all the way around the home to the side. we ran the four strands in a 1.5" conduit all the way around, and then cut two more holes directly behind the right and left sides of the gallos. all the conduit was finished with weather proof sealant/cement, and the only visible change from the house are three single-gang junction boxes for the conduit. of course, we sealed all the holes with foam insulation and then weatherproof caulking for an airtight fit. inside we soldered all the speaker wire to some nice quickport wall plates fitted with cardas binding posts at the speaker end. at the rack end we left the wire run intact and soldered some cardas spades on there.
we needed to give the gallos some juice and emotional involvement for a real-world price. also, simplicity was necessary since rack space is at a premium. we went the hybrid biamping route, with a dk design mk iii amp for the mids and highs, and the gallo reference amp for the bass. we picked up the dk design from a dealer demo, and i think it's a fantastic integrated.
the dk design is running full range...we used the pre-outs on the integrated to feed the low-pass on the gallo bass amplifier. the gallo amp has a built in low pass x-over, which we set to 50Hz for the second voice coil.
in terms of source, the dk design is being fed by an mht labs havana dac (awesome piece of equipment for under 1000usd), which in turn was being fed by a digital optical connection from an apple airport express.
for those of you who aren't familiar with apple ipods or itunes, there is an awesome free application called 'remote'. it allows you to use an ipod touch as a user inteface for itunes stored on the computer. works with windows pcs as well as macs. we ripped about 500 cds in apple lossless format, but it on a terabyte raid external hdd, and plugged it into his computer. the ipod works only as a remote control; no music is stored on there. it's amazing...you just use it to select play lists, even control the volume. the music is streamed via wifi to the airport extreme, which then connects to the dac via digital optical cable. this keeps great integrity of the original disc. with the remote function, there's no limitation of space of the ipod...you're only limited by the size of the hdd on the computer. some basic networking skills are required to setup the airport express router, but in most cases the networking setup will be fairly simple.
ok...well i gotta get back to work...but more later
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