My New Reference Line Array SpeakersI recently took delivery a pair of Rick Craig's line arrays and custom bass arrays. He delivered them from North Carolina to Boston in person! I don't know too many speaker manufacturers will deliver and install their speakers for their customers in person. May be, if you ordered a pair of WAMM from David Wilson he will come and set them up for you. But, the WAMM is in the six-figure price range.
My pair of line arrays is custom configured with 8 7" Scan-Speak Revelator mid-woofers and 8 Fountek ribbon tweeters per side. I've chosen the Scan-Speak drivers for their excellent bass performance and smooth and detailed midrange. This same driver was used in Rick's best selling 2-way SSR monitor with excellent results so I have confidence that the Scan-Speak will work well with the Fountek in the line array configuration. For maximum flexibility, I asked Rick to bring out the input and output of the crossovers to the external banana jacks and also bring out the input of the mid drivers and the tweeter drivers. With the appropriate jumpers inserted into the banana jacks on the base, I can drive the speakers using the internal crossovers with either a single amp or dual amps. Since the driver input are also available externally, I can drive the mid and tweeter array directly from my TacT digital amplifiers which can be configured with digital crossover. To extend the bass range of the line arrays, I asked Rick to design for me a pair of bass arrays. I wanted to match the characteristic of the Scan-Speak mid-woofers so we chose four 10" Scan-Speak Revelator sub-woofers per side. A 1000-Watt Keiga amp powers each bass array. Both the line and bass arrays used sealed box design.
I ordered the speakers in early April and got them installed in my listening room on July 2. During the designing and building process, I worked with Rick very closely and he kept me informed on every step. It was a pleasure experience indeed working with Rick on this project.
These speakers are very heavy. They certainly require two persons to move them. Setting up the speakers was however straight forward. Rick mounted the bases to the speaker cabinets and attached the jumpers to the back of the line arrays. When this was done, we placed the line arrays to the same location as my previous speakers. The speakers were 8 feet out from the front wall, the left speaker was 2 feet from left wall, and the right speaker was 10 feet from the right wall. Initially, we only used a single bass tower and placed it along the left sidewall half way between the line arrays and the listening position. This was the location, which gave the best bass response in my room from my Hsu Research subwoofer. The listening position was about 11’ from the line arrays.
Initially, I wanted to hear how the speakers sound using the line array’s internal crossovers so we jumpered the speakers appropriately. Using my TacT Audio 2.2XP, I selected 60Hz as the crossover frequency between the bass tower and the line arrays. I used only one TacT S2150X to drive the line arrays.
Even without any room correction, these speakers sounded glorious. Rick played several of his favorite CDs to demonstrate the line arrays. My initial impressions were: excellent dynamics, accurate tonal characteristic, and detailed, deep bass response. While we were listening to CDs after CDs, Rick shared with me some tips on doing room measurement, selecting active crossover frequency, selecting target curve for the line arrays based on his experience with his DEQX.
After Rick left, I added the second bass tower to the system. It was placed on the opposite side of the first tower. They both faced directly toward the listening position. I ran a quick room correction with my TacT 2.2XP. With room correction, the bass became more coherent between the line arrays and the bass towers as the appropriate time delays were added to the bass towers. The overall sound of the system became smoother as the RCS took out the dips and peaks due to room reflections.
These speakers are truly amazing. I already knew they have excellent dynamic range and capable of playing concert hall SPL levels without strain. But, what I didn’t expect was that they sounded so good when I listened to them in low SPL levels late at night! This may be due to their high sensitivity (95 dB SPL/1 Watt/1 meter) and their near field radiation patterns. Their detail retrieval is first rate; I can now hear more nuances from the singer’s voice and musical instruments. Listening to Glenn Gould’s and Keith Jarrett’s recording, I can hear them humming in the background louder than ever before
. However, what I like most about these speakers is their ability to reproduce the sound of musical instruments accurately; in particular the sound of cello, trumpet and violin. Human voice came through so real that becomes spooky at times. For example, when I first heard “The Fibble-Ow Blues” from Jon Faddis’s Teranga CD, I heard a voice about 50 seconds into the cut. It sounded so real that I thought the person was in the room. As I listened to my CD collection I felt like that I'm hearing them the first time. So far I am very happy with the level of performance these speakers provide.
As good as they are now, I still have many optimization I can do to the sound quality of these speakers. I still have not tried them in the bi-amp mode. I still have not tried driving them directly from my TacT with active crossover. I still have not tried them with SET tube amplifiers. The locations of my subwoofer towers are perhaps suboptimal. I may want to move them to the room corners behind the line arrays. In the coming weeks I will try all these. In the mean time I can’t stop listening to them playing my favorite music.
-Mike
