Well...it's a
long story, but, briefly--
1. The speakers didn't arrive at my house until 7:30pm Friday. I was VERY nervous about what I might do for the meeting the next day if the speakers didn't arrive. The speakers had been well packed in a plywood crate, but the trucking co. had dumped it over and emptied the contents and then stuffed everything back in, so Clayton and I decided to assemble them that nite in my garage.
We did so and discovered fortunately that everything was there, undamaged.
2. We got them setup in the church's large room--it's about 25' wide, 65' deep, and 10' high. After auto-equalizing the system, tweaking the positions, etc....
...Clayton was satisfied. (We used, initially, my Outlaw 770 200WPC-times-7 poweramp.)
3. The sound was quite good, overall. My sonic requirements for tonality are NOT flatness--I feel speakers neeed more bass and lower-MR energy and less treble to sound good, so the initial system sounded thin and bright
to me. During the day, I created another response program with about 3dB more bass/lower-MR and about 3dB less treble, and we alternated between them. For some reason, and I say that because I simply don't hear much of it, I'm becoming rather sensitive to the quality of treble, and we could never get the treble balance right
for me. Others were quite happy.
The Nemesis is a quite-good-sounding system--transparent, tonally neutral if you want it to be, and spacious. The 4 channels of two 2.5WPC Music Reference EM7 amps sounded less edgy, more tonally attractive, more spacious, but less punchy, than the Outlaw; most listeners preferred the system sound with the EM7s than with the Outlaw.
Seeing Clayton's new 2-plate design cause me to think I might build my bass system like that, instead of a truncated-V baffle similar to what I'm using now. Maybe the 2 SonicCraft 12" woofers per channel wouldn't have enough surface to create the bottom-octave energy I need if mounted on a narrow baffle, so maybe I'd have to add another woofer. We'll see...or
hear.
I continue to tweak my system's tonal balance, most recently adding some treble energy and removing some warmth (some would call it
thickness). Using about 15 Watts total power from 6 channels of amplification, my system still has more bottom-octave energy than either version of Clayton's speakers and a more-attractive treble, but one must keep in mind that the tonality of either of these system is instantly changable to about whatever the listener wants. And I still think that the 6-1/2" SonicCraft driver is the world's best B/MR driver bargain and excellent overall, with about the best MR transparency I've ever heard.
