Where were we? Oh yes, the CC5.
The problem is I can't exactly set things up like I'd prefer due to my intransigent better half digging her heels in SO when life gives you lemons you squeeze them. Sometimes squeezing Lynda's lemons helps but not this time so I called up Wendell at Magnepan and explained my dilemma.
After some commiserating about my having suffered the torments of the damned at the paws of that infernal Molly dog he decided that a CC5 would be the ticket.
Not knowing any better, I said okay.
Set up was a puzzler for me as if it's not two channel I'm kinda stumped. I've got a two channel preamp w/ a sub piggy backed onto a main out so what do I do?
The answer was to run to Rat Shack and pick up a Y adaptor: two male RCA to one female. That goes to a main out which goes to the amp which drives the CC5. As luck would have it, AVNerdguy had just recapped a Bryston 3B Pro for me and it has a gain pots on the front. I switched that to mono, hooked the amp up to the preamp (using an XLR to RCA adaptor on the amp from Parts Express which then goes to the Y adaptor), ran some speaker cables from the Bryston to the CC5 and I was in bidniss!
I'm using AVNerdguy's old hot rodded Hafler XL280 to run the MMGs and it was just a matter of adjusting the gain pot on the Bryston until everything blended in.
Much ado is made on the Magnepan site about how difficult it is to set this sucker up so you'll need to use the enclosed CD or else you're asking for Big Trouble. I didn't see any enclosed CD so I did it the way I do everything: by eyebone and by earbone.
To my ears, if the MMGs are at 100% the CC5 at 60-70% worked out best. If the volume for the CC5 was up too much vocals kind of barked out at me and the entire soundstage was pulled to the center with the MMGs being pushed to the back like an unwanted mariachi band at a wedding reception.
Listen, turn the gain screw on the Bryston, walk around, turn the screw a bit this way, a bit that way, perfect.
It was pretty easy to set it up and the end result is a seamless soundstage throughout the room.
With the Magnepans they have to go big to achieve a realistic soundstage with two speakers (there's other reasons for the big boys but that's one of them). If you look at the room, one thing that really sticks out like a sore thumb is just how far apart the little MMGs are.
When it's balanced correctly, the CC5 takes up the slack in the center and gets rid of that weird hole I had going on. Now you can walk from one side of the room to the other and it's a wall of sound that squirrely old Phil Spector could only dream of.
I understand that Mr. Spector is currently enjoying one of these which isn't even close:
Eat your heart out, bud!
With the sound now coming from the entire wall, movies and television are also greatly improved as well. Sound quality, at least - the programming is still wretched. Because the CC5 is curved the sound is dispersed in a pretty wide field so you can understand whatever it is that they're mumbling about no matter how far off axis you're sitting.
The dog still has the best seat in the house for movies. Go figure.
Initially I wanted to put the CC5 up top and have it angled downwards but I was overruled by she who must be obeyed. We ended up setting it under the television and it was a perfect fit. I'm told that if the CC5 was any bigger we'd have problems which sounded rather ominious at the time. Luckily, it's 3' wide by 10" tall.
and like all of the Magnepans it's a thin dipole but it only needs to be a foot or two out from the wall which is a good thing.
Swiping the info from the factory website, the CC5 employs a horizontal, curved quasi-ribbon midrange/tweeter and quasi-ribbon super-tweeter with a range from 200-20K hz. It's no subwoofer but it's not meant to be. I was a little worried about running the Bryston mono into a 3 Ohm load but it runs cool and sounds just fine.
What the CC5 does is it allows you to use two smaller main Maggies in a large room and then it fills in the hole in the center and it pulls the sound together. You don't have that channel here and other channel way the hell over there, you have a large, musical wall.
The Beatles mused upon how cool it would be to have musical wallpaper; we may not have that but this is pretty damned close.
You wouldn't want to just listen to a CC5 by itself but it does blend in nicely with the MMGs and I would suspect the 1.7s. As I said, get the sound up too high and it seems "shouty" but blend it in and it's seamless.
The ultimate arbitrator is the dreaded Mother In Law so it was with some trepidation that I let the system warm up in preperation for her afternoon Spanish soap operas. The result?
She likes it - it gets the Mother In Law stamp of approval!Good job, Magnepan!
