[Housteau]

The room is basically finished.  I have had the time to bring the room to this point, but have not yet had the time to tune the system to the new room, or even have a quick listen.  I will be out of town for a few weeks and I will start that set-up process once I get back. 

This first photo shows my old room and back wall.  Notice how close the listening chair is to it.







The following photos show the new space created behind my chair with my remodeling project.











These show the rest of the room.  Notice the step up into the room from the entrance way.  I had the room raised 5.5 inches.  There are 5 vertical corners in the room.  They are all filled with triangular pieces of 703 and covered with decorative panels.  The corners on the front wall down from the cathedral peak are also filled with triangular 703, just a bit smaller.  The panels along the cathedral peak run its entire length, are 4 inches thick also of 703 and 38 inched across.  All of these treatments are similar to what I had in my old room, just improved to make up for the new space. 

[Austin08]

Nice!!!! I like the sculpture. Did you made that?

[PMAT]

Looks great. I bet you are anxious to dial it in.

[John Casler]

                       WOW!

[Housteau]

Nice!!!! I like the sculpture. Did you made that?

A fellow I know did that as part of his art show quite a few years ago.  His inspiration for that came from Star Wars with Hans Solo being frozen in carbonite.  All of the art in the room is either based on Fantasy, SiFi, or Magic.  I guess I see the creating of the virtual soundstage as a bit of magic when done right.

[Housteau]

Looks great. I bet you are anxious to dial it in.

It really is hard to walk away from it right now without doing any listening.  But with having to leave the last thing I want to do is try to rush the most important part.   

[Rob Babcock]

Very nice!  It looks great and I bet it sounds even better.  Love those VMPSs, sad that there will be no more.

[Big Red Machine]

This is serious stuff boys and girls.  Kudos!

[geowak]

Very nice setup. Looks like you have gone the full 9 yards. Maybe 10! I bet this sound system sounds great. The sculpture is cool. Great stuff. Many happy hours of listening pleasure for you.....

[Hipper]

Hmmm. Not bad I suppose.....

Of course it looks brilliant!

It will be interesting to hear how the room alterations will change the sound, notably the space behind your chair and its asymmetry, and perhaps that lower step by the left VLA. Presumably the photos show your seat in the original position. Are you expecting to have to move speakers and chair to obtain best sound, not to mention adjustments to the DCX?

I have RM30Ms in a smaller room but have found by measurements and ears that my chair and speakers close to their walls gives the best sound. My ears are 70cm from the rear wall, or 50cm from the treatment on that wall.

[Housteau]

Love those VMPSs, sad that there will be no more.

It is very sad.  It was such an exciting time back in 2007 when the V60s and VLAs came available and I had known they were exactly what I had been waiting for.  The forum was so alive with interest as the first postings hit from the first owners, which I was fortunate enough to be.  Now with this new room I get to relive that wonderful time all over again.

[Housteau]

This is serious stuff boys and girls.  Kudos!

Very nice setup. Looks like you have gone the full 9 yards. Maybe 10! I bet this sound system sounds great. The sculpture is cool. Great stuff. Many happy hours of listening pleasure for you.....

Thank you. 

This didn't happen overnight and I have had it in the planning stage for quite some time.  No it wasn't inexpensive, but if you consider the cost of some audio components today, and also consider the room as the most important component, then doing this was a true bargain.  As in anything else there can always be better, but for me this is my dream room. 

I did take the opportunity to install an industrial isolation transformer for the audio outlets.

[John Casler]

Very nice!  It looks great and I bet it sounds even better.  Love those VMPSs, sad that there will be no more.

Actually, there is one more single Pair of the RM-v60 in Macassar Ebony still available. and can be built to Brian's OXO specs with a choice of Aricap, TRT, or Mundorf caps, for roughly what Brian charged.

It has the full shipping crates and everything needed to be full VMPS certified, exactly as Brian would have built them.

[Housteau]

It will be interesting to hear how the room alterations will change the sound, notably the space behind your chair and its asymmetry, and perhaps that lower step by the left VLA. Presumably the photos show your seat in the original position. Are you expecting to have to move speakers and chair to obtain best sound, not to mention adjustments to the DCX?

I have RM30Ms in a smaller room but have found by measurements and ears that my chair and speakers close to their walls gives the best sound. My ears are 70cm from the rear wall, or 50cm from the treatment on that wall.

Yes, the next phase of tuning the system in should be very interesting.  My intent was to create the best opportunity with the new room for my system to max out its full potential.  I don't think the asymmetry being behind the listening position will be an issue.  My thoughts were that the positives of opening up that space behind me would out weigh the negatives, if any, of the wall offset.  If something does become apparent then I will work with some acoustic controls to correct it.

The photos show the chair and speakers in my best guess starting positions.  The chair has been moved back from its original position by just over a foot and the speakers are a bit wider apart.  The V60s are 9ft center to center and 63 inches out from the wall with the chair 10ft to each speaker.  Being dipoles they require space behind them for me to create the soundstage that I like.  Those floor mounted tube traps and artificial plants help with that.  The VLAs are as wide apart as I can have them right now due to the drop in the floor at the entrance.  This is actually just a bit wider then they were before.  If they need to go wider, then I can build a platform for the one on the left to slide over on.  That one door has no need to open.  As you can see, as nice sized as the room is there still may be small compromizes that need to be made.

The DCX will be essential here in setting both the correct timing and phase of this 4 piece system to have that accurate wave launch.  This control will allow me to have the VLAs in locations that work both visually and functionally.  I plan to use more potential of that DCX for this integration.  What helps here is that these are not really bass towers, like what my Infinity rs1bs had, but sub bass towers.  This is a new room with all new dimensions.  So all the old standing wave issues I used to have will have all changed.  My hope is that they will have changed for the better.  Mathmatically the dimensions look good.  But, that is only part of the story and the real word testing will most often be quite different.

[Housteau]

I have RM30Ms in a smaller room but have found by measurements and ears that my chair and speakers close to their walls gives the best sound. My ears are 70cm from the rear wall, or 50cm from the treatment on that wall.

I thought my old room with me close to the back wall also sounded just fine.  But, the consensus is that if we can get ourselves away from that close boundry things will be better.  The bass will have the potential to be more accurate and the upper frequencies will be free from comb filtering and other negative boundry effects.  With that said, moving into a smaller room to get away from that back wall may not have great results due to the nature of that room.  In my case I have moved the back wall out away from me completely changing the nature of that total space.

In my old room the speakers were set up along the long wall.  In the new room that long wall has now become the short wall, yet I still have the same width I enjoyed before.  When using the long wall there are issues with standing waves and especially nulls that can be worse than if one was using the short wall instead.  There is some great info on Ethan's site that goes through this. 

Another side benefit is that I now have a space where I can comfortably have a few friends over where they can be behind an just to the side of the listening position.  While not in the sweetspot at least the ones not in the listening chair will not be far off to the sides as they had to be with my old set up.

[jimdgoulding]

Old sport, I think I could be immersed in an acoustically recorded album w/o much difficulty if you were to invite me over.

[Housteau]

Old sport, I think I could be immersed in an acoustically recorded album w/o much difficulty if you were to invite me over.

Sure, consider it done.  I love acoustic music.  I also love making my own live recordings to enjoy at home when I get the chance.  It really helps being at the location when a recording was made to know how it should then sound in your room.  For being such a large speaker system it has the ability to completely disappear and become non-localized.  That is one of the things I love the most about it.  It can set a soundstage to properly play large scale works as well as intimate ones, keeping the performer(s) in proper scale.  Some larger systems can sound very majestic on the big stuff, but then they paint an image of a solo voice 2 feet across.

[jimdgoulding]

Yep, had that experience, too.  I think the biggest reason I use point source speakers is because of faithfulness to a singer's physicality or any instrument's actually.  I listened to some planars not long ago and was bothered by a hollowness, for lack of a better term, to the image of the source.  My speakers don't quite do justice to the height of a venue cause they short and their drivers near one another.

[John Casler]

The wonderful thing about most of Brian's designs is that, while they are planars, they often operate like a "point source" in the mids and highs.

Since all the neopanels are in a thin vertical line, and planars "beam" in the upper frequencies, the listener basically only hears direct sound from the Neopanel(s) at ear level.  They are not like cone drivers with significant vertical dispersion, so you hear upper and lower drivers with some phase issues.

And since the tweeter is generally at or around ear level, and with a 1st order phase coherent XO, the Neopanel driver section immediately above and below the tweeter sum into virtually the same driver.

I have also heard that "hollowness" you mention with other types of dipole planars that aren't set up to well and IMO often caused by a less than ideal phase relationship between the Direct, and Reflected wave, due to the speaker being too close to the front wall.

Brian addressed this issue via the "folded wing" cabinet shape, and for less than ideal placements the foam wedge that allows the listener to "control" that rear wave launch magnitude as necessary.

[jimdgoulding]

Thanks, John, for a thoughtful reply.  I was at a guy's house yesterday who uses ADS tower speakers with two 10" cones handling the lower frequencies in each.  Damn, they were fast and clean and allowed for a good deal of transparency down low.  I suspect they are not damped within well enough cause their was this boxy sound from record to record.  Still, there was a lot to like particularly on big passages in symphonic recordings.

Yesterday, a Bugle 2 phono pre arrived at my door and I compared it with a Vista phono pre for about three hours.  The Bugle is uniformly clean top to bottom (and very quiet) while the Vista is slightly softer in the high and low ends.  Still, and probably because of that, I have a warm spot in my heart for the Vista.  It is the more "romantic" sounding, the Bugle the more tactile.  The Bugle (from Hagtech) cost $189.00 including shipping.  I believe the Vista is $299.00.  These are very, very good values, folks, and they are a snap to take in and out of a system.  One of my pals has a $1,500.00 phono pre.  While I haven't heard it in my system, he says it's no better in his that his Vista.

For somebody wanting to get into analog, you could mate one of these, or two like me, with, say a VPI Traveler table or something comparable, and a quality phono cartridge and you're cooking with gas for not a lot of money.  Members of my audio club record my albums and others into their computers.  They have retired their CD players and the software, too.