Hi,
Thanks for the nice comments Midnite Mick, Response Audio, WEEZ, A6M-ZERO! It's been a lot of fun, and a lot of work!! I don't know if you've read the build thread here:
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=32072.0 but i originally wired one of the crossovers incorrectly, and noticed AFTER they were assembled! Oh man, tracing the signal path, through one of the extremis holes with a flashlight and a mirror... not fun!
Check and test those crossovers before you pull the glue out!
Answers to the questions:
They were painted by the very talented and nice guys at Prestige Auto, in Brisbane OZ. They're an approved Ferrari paint shop, and it was pretty exciting to just go in there and see all the Lambos and Ferraris, some cool old Jags too. There must have been 5 Italian supercars in there, in various states of undress..a few front end smushes (yikes!) Anyways, i've had bad luck with cheap paint shops before, and didn't want to mess around with the HT8's.
They cost a lot to paint.. Around $1400 AUS, which is around $1300 CAD. I had three colour tests done, so i could see the final results. Most of the tests had to do with the shine / specularity of the paint, settling on the 'just slightly matte' finish which i think works really well. The tests took 3.5 hours total, which at $85 an hour shop rate added to the cost... You could get them painted for a lot cheaper, most definitely, but i'm new to Brisbane and don't have many connections or tips for this kind of thing.. I knew Prestige Auto would do a first rate job, the first time.
Here's some more shots of them in the room:
Don't let the wide angle lens and high ceiling fool you... These aren't small speakers! But the thinness of them does help minimize the visual weight when viewed from the front.
Yes, that cat is a little fat
They look pretty short in this shot, but the ceiling is 30' / 10m... so factor that!
This room, with all the hard walls and floors is pretty 'wet' sounding. Not ideal for sure, but there's not much i can do. What's
really interesting is how the HT8's handle this. While they were being painted, we were using some bookshelf speakers - mid range Mission ones - a little dry and dead and not much low end even for a bookshelf (typical thin 'British sounding' (sorry Mission and B&W owners...it's true!)), but not the worst speakers. No matter what i did, i couldn't get them to sound good in this big room. The were either too quiet, or loud and defocused... totally
'shoes in the dryer' sounding. the room basically massacring whatever they put out. My girlfriend said straight away 'Those sound horrible!' and she was right. It worried me that the room would ruin the poise of the HT8's.
Well, so fantastically for me, this was entirely not so. The 8's consume the entire room, and i know this is so cliche, but they
fill the room with music. I'll be in the kitchen, WAYYY out of the official sweet spot and still get beautiful highs and focused bass. Those ribbon tweeters have such unbelievable off-axis. If you haven't heard these things, i respect you'd have a hard time believing it, but you can actually walk around the room and maintain imaging. You can basically stand between the two of them and get a center image, bumping heads with the singer.
The wheels haven't yet vibrated, but i've yet to bust out the gangsta rap, or my Yo-Yo Ma cello records, so we'll see. Some silicone in the bearing shafts of both the speakers and the wheels seems to be doing the trick. On hard floors, wheels are great. Some purists might scoff, but really they sit on fine points and there's no rattle. It's fine.
I know this probably sounds like a paid advertisement for Al and his RAW beauties, but it's not. I just like his stuff. I'm even looking at getting another set, HT2's this time, for monitors in a recording studio. That is going to be another interesting project.. stay tuned.
Thanks for the kind comments,
Cheers,
/A
