[nlitworld]

once I did there was a noticeable improvement.

That's what I needed to know. I'll pull the drivers out shortly and add a little more fluff. Do this once and do it right. Thanks!

[nlitworld]

Yep, the little bit of extra polyfill did help smooth out the woofer a little. Before it seemed a bit extra punchy and now it's just full and rich in all the right ways. Things seem to be breaking in nicely since I ran them a ton as just parts on an ironing board. I'm on hour 4 tonight of blasting music and have been throwing every type of music everything at them. Currently have Free Bird at entirely too loud for 11pm but it's fantastic! I finally arranged the speakers symmetrically for the first time and worked in the subs to cross out at 80hz and the stereo imaging in there is amazing. It really is one cohesive image placed right in front of you and it's totally mind blowing all the detail you can pick up on. Also it creeps me out when there is distortion that I never noticed before as I think I wired something wrong but it's supposed to be like that.

Danny, I'm not sure if you had to sell your soul to the devil to design speakers this perfect but I wouldn't be surprised. They are amazing! I was right in thinking you made a hot rodded Corvette of a speaker. Straight forward, no-frills, no fancy electronic gadgetry and a lot of muscle under the hood but with excellent execution and value that can make one hell of a good time. I am just astounded how good these sound and the fact I helped make them just adds that extra bit of special to them. Thank you for choosing to help us all with your speaker kits and extensive knowledge. I'm sure you could make a butt load more money by selling speakers by traditional means and markups. The fact that you make high end audio accessible to the average guy is fantastic.

On that note, back to blasting more music til the wee hours of the morning.

-Lloyd

[nadirmg]

Lloyd, simply amazing work! It's been really fun watching your speaker build! And dude... your work with the paint... holy cow...! 
NICE!!!!

[Tyson]

Yep, the little bit of extra polyfill did help smooth out the woofer a little. Before it seemed a bit extra punchy and now it's just full and rich in all the right ways. Things seem to be breaking in nicely since I ran them a ton as just parts on an ironing board. I'm on hour 4 tonight of blasting music and have been throwing every type of music everything at them. Currently have Free Bird at entirely too loud for 11pm but it's fantastic! I finally arranged the speakers symmetrically for the first time and worked in the subs to cross out at 80hz and the stereo imaging in there is amazing. It really is one cohesive image placed right in front of you and it's totally mind blowing all the detail you can pick up on. Also it creeps me out when there is distortion that I never noticed before as I think I wired something wrong but it's supposed to be like that.

Danny, I'm not sure if you had to sell your soul to the devil to design speakers this perfect but I wouldn't be surprised. They are amazing! I was right in thinking you made a hot rodded Corvette of a speaker. Straight forward, no-frills, no fancy electronic gadgetry and a lot of muscle under the hood but with excellent execution and value that can make one hell of a good time. I am just astounded how good these sound and the fact I helped make them just adds that extra bit of special to them. Thank you for choosing to help us all with your speaker kits and extensive knowledge. I'm sure you could make a butt load more money by selling speakers by traditional means and markups. The fact that you make high end audio accessible to the average guy is fantastic.

On that note, back to blasting more music til the wee hours of the morning.

-Lloyd

Hehe, that's so true.  The NX series is true high end.  Not 'great for the money', but rather 'great, period, price be damned'. 

[hawkeyejw]

Always fun to watch these builds as they come along and hear new owners’ impressions at the end. These were an exceptional build, congrats and enjoy Lloyd!

[Tyson]

Also I am jealous of your painting skills - your speakers look spectacular.  Based on the quality of the finish combined with the quality of the sound, they match up with $10k retail speakers. 

[nlitworld]

Thank you guys for the compliments. It really means a lot. I've been super happy with these speakers so far. I still keep finding songs that sound so much different than my old speakers, so it's been a lot of fun to listen to everything again. Finally had a chance to do some REW measuring this morning and it's amazing how smooth they are, especially from 1k and up. Aaaaaaaamazing. I still need to do more room treatments to clean up below that. But the subs are now fairly smoothly crossed over for each one separately and combined.

As for painting, it's all a lot of practice and an exercise in patience but a large portion of it is using nice materials and fancy ass colors. It's like a racing driver can drive a Kia pretty damn quick, but hand an average Joe a Porsche and they can go fast pretty easily. My speakers are not perfect paint jobs, but you would never know unless I pointed out the flaws. I'm also the type that will nitpick my paint jobs to no end. I can't go to car shows as I end up making faces at bad paint jobs and piss off car owners(true story). That's when I learned I don't have a good poker face. That level of scrutinizing also makes it so you know what needs to be improved upon for the next project. Practice makes perfect. Practicing on goofy little stuff makes it where you can learn good tricks perfecting the craft and wind up with fancy painted bicycles, video game controllers, moto helmets and even speakers. It's a lot of fun to dive into these projects. I'd imagine it won't be the last set of speakers I ever paint. 

[nlitworld]

So I finally got around to measuring my room with new speakers and subs placed about as good as they'll get. I'm sure if I completely reorganize the room I could find a better solution, but this is already pretty fantastic and A HELL of a lot better than my old Klipsch were. It's a shame that I'm in the smallest room in the house, but my wife said I don't get to monopolize the garage and the bigger spare bedroom lol. I'm using the dsp in my receiver to knock down the 60-70hz small room bass hump a little and bring up the 4Khz a touch which is a result of not using extreme toe in directly to the mic. I do like the clarity of no dsp better but it is one of the necessary evils in this small room at the moment. Right now I have the speakers in a semi-near field setup about 5 feet apart and 4'8" from listening position and toed in to just behind the listening position. This setup in my small room keeps things as consistent as possible but there are 2 big ones @190hz and 360hz that I still need to fix, but that's a different project. All in all, they sound freaking fantastic.  While it is a fun sound for more bass on live rock tracks, it muddies up everything so I'll opt for clean and smooth at about +5dB. Also, please excuse the rats nest of cables. Merely a temporary deal that will be cleaned up. Now that speaker placement is solidified I can finally scale down wires to size and install tube connector ends.



Response with DSP on receiver




Response w/o DSP




Waterfall




Spectrogram




Room

[Digi-G]

Nice setup and love your speakers.  What is the "ramp" thing in the middle of the speakers - it looks interesting.

[nlitworld]

It's an extra 4" thick acoustic panel I had around that I placed there to try and tame the room resonances. I would need to resize it to fit on the wall there, but for the meantime I just have it leaned up against the wall. Having one there really helps smooth out some of the 150-500 funkyness. I also have one on the sides at first reflection and one just above my head on the ceiling. I know having the door closed does make it less jittery on the graph. It also increases a spike in pressure at 50hz so I tend to leave it open. My ears don't hear the jittery graph line, but they do hear the spike in bass. There's a lot of work to do with acoustics, but those are my next set of projects.

The biggest thing was getting the positioning right in my small room and integrating the subs. I know the nasty dip at 190hz looks gross but it was a compromise from a similar cut at 100hz and spike at 70hz and 140hz. I ended up pulling everything farther out into the room (front baffle 36" from front wall), running my subs much lower power (20%) but crossing them over much higher at about 110hz.

[Danny Richie]

When taking a room response measurement please remember to only measure one speaker at a time.

[Folsom]

Noicccceee.

[nlitworld]

When taking a room response measurement please remember to only measure one speaker at a time.

Hi Danny,
Thanks for the tip! I'm still fumbling my way through learning how to work REW, so I'll take any bit of advice I can get. And yes, I was measuring both speakers at the same time. I'll measure again this evening one at a time and see if I can get it any better. I'm already super happy with how they sound but if it can be better then I'm all for it!

[nlitworld]

Hey Danny,
Thank you for the tip on using REW properly. I feel silly that I was doing it wrong the whole time, but the improvement is amazing. I went crazy measuring a bunch of stuff, changed settings, placement, and even rearranged the entire room 90°. In the end, I came back to a somewhat similar layout in the room but I tried stacking the subs. For some reason, that was the trick for smoothing the integration of each sub to a speaker (R on bottom, L on top). It still gets the stereo imaging out of it, but it smoothed out some of the phase issues between subs and speakers. It still measures similar if not a little smoother on each speaker, but it sounds MUCH more coherent, spacious and detailed top to bottom. I've been amazed with these speakers at every little improvement. Proper placement and integration with these was not a small improvement, but a massive increase in performance. It's part of the gig for listening in a small room, but also an absolute testament to how fantastic these speakers are that they can be presented with that kind of physical limitations and still shine. Holy crap!

Thank you again for all the help from you and your team.