Great job, John and a great LAOC Audio Society event as usual!
I wish I had brought a digital camera to show you all. I did snap a couple of poor pics with my phone camera, but the L and R RM30's were spaced sooooo wide apart, there was no way to get'em all in one picture. Of course, having a separate center RM30 helps you do this sort of thing..
The equipment present was exactly as John listed above, but I wasn't prepared to actually see in person how 'large' the largers really were
The two larger subwoofers totally made the RM30's look tiny by comparison.
We did have a technical difficulty (which meeting doesn't?), but considering that and the results after it was corrected, I have a few general impressions of the whole system, considering I'm pretty familiar with most of the gear present, i.e. UDP-1, Bryston BP26 preamp, Son of Ampzilla.
The Trinaural process/setup is the real deal. You do get a rock solid center image that is dense, unwavering, and involving. The peripheral instruments, staging don't seem to suffer b/c of this center channel. There's no sense of artificial special effects or unnaturalness with Trinaural that you can get with Dolby surround or DTS, etc. It just seems like a real good 2-channel stereo and soundstaging with unusually stable center fill. If I could afford the extra amp, speaker, cables, and the Trinaural process, I would think about this option, especially if you are an afacionado of that dense, luscious center image.
The Larger sub is crazy well-built, especially at the price. It also doesn't seem to be the thumping, booming type of special-effects sub, which I can't stand. I believe the RM30's were run full-range without going through the active x-over and Largers cutting in at 35Hz. There did seem to be some room bass problems, probably due to the hollow R side wall/compartment and excessive bass leak from room, but there were couple of songs that immediately struck the brain as being the real thing, especially acoustic bass instruments. I was tempted to pull out my 50 Cent Rap demo song, but I didn't want to shock some of the elderly audience members
RM30's... These are very interesting speakers. They seemed smaller than I expected (good), especially for the 7 drivers per side. To really evaluate them, I would need to get'em in my room in a 2-channel stereo setup without the Larger subs. Generally speaking, I was somewhat surprised by how round and smooth the midrange frequencies were via the planar drivers. Now I know UDP-1 and SoA both have this quality, so I'd be interested in hearing the RM30 with something like the NuForce amp to see if the midrange can be made to be a bit more incisive and edgy, if you like that kind of thing, that is.
The ribbon tweeter was implemented VERY well. Having owned basically very similar ribbons myself, I KNOW some real work went into the crossover design and fine-tuning of this ribbon tweeter to get it to sound so extended, shimmering, detailed, and fast without getting distortions. In fact, I wish Dave Wilson would hire Brian to redesign the tweeter section of the Maxx2 with this ribbon/x-over. But I digress...
It was difficult to evaluate the bass of RM30 b/c of 2 Largers, but I couldn't hear much to complain about upper and mid-bass at least given the room limitations.
Kudos to John Castler for setting up this complicated behemoth of a system and demo'ing them successfully. If one wanted a simpler system, I suspect something like a good CDP->neutral tube preamp (tuberolled Minimax or SAS Labs?)->NuForce Monos->pair of RM30's would do very well in reasonably-sized rooms.
