0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. Read 4756 times.
It's all so very subjective of course.I think Eric and I prefer diff. type of sound. We didn't seem to agree on much of the same systems as we heard at the CES either. Most people didn't seem to agree on CES systems from all the posts of people who went.I tried to describe the diffs as best I can though and the X's and Alphas certainly have them.There are certain things like dynamic impact from woofers and planars in the midrange that are just flat out different.Up to the individual to dec ...
I'm trying to be VERY careful posting here...First I actualyl don't think my room trounces Eric's like he said. Damn, I can even agree with him on that eh?His room treatments and large open doorway to the rest of the house sounded like it didn't effect the sound in any degrading way that I could tell in my limited time there.That's what a great room is meant to do so that's about that. I keep meaning to by some compressed fiberglass panels (what Eric has in his room) to try some more damping in ...
One person owned both speakers, although to the best of my knowlage they were never in the same room at the same time. He had at least one meeting of audiophiles to his house.I think he sold his RM40's a few months ago as (I know) he preffered and I think he still owns the Alpha's.He is also a proffesional in the audio community and will NOT get into this conversation because of that reason, and I will not mention his name either.He got the 40's pretty early on and I don't think he had any cap upgrade, and I'm sure he did not have the FST upgrade.
My comment that I'm working on an Alpha center (It's about 95% done) got erased.I also said that another pair of Alphas would make pretty good surrounds to match Alphas.There's a posibility of making a normal box cabinet 6 woofer/ 6 neo smaller surround that matches the drivers number and x-over of the curved face center chan.
Q, I think the pas. rad. on the X's works great. There's no doubt it's super tight and clean. As I said I think it MAY be overdamped stopping full transients. That's a matter of adjustment and no speaker design flaw in any way. I do also understand that many people think 'ported' equals inferior to sealed (the pas. rad. is meant to act like a sealed sub but w/ ported extention). There have certainly been millions of pages of ported vs. sealed subwoofer debates and this is really the same thing here. Probably no reason to write more about it. The Alpha's bass specifically is incredibly quick and controlled. It's hard to describe other than how I already have.... when pushing massive ammounts of bass each woofer is hardly moving. This is NOT the same as a large ported subwoofer driver. It's terribly tight and accurate. It takes almost nothing to start and stop the 18 woofers dividing up the Watts and highly effi. The Alphas have four 3" double flared ports on the back per cabinet. There's 100% ZERO air noise from them at any time so that's no issue. "-While it is true that adjustment items, such as Potentiometers in line can degrade the signal to some degree, the benefits of adjustment probably far outweigh the negatives of non-adjustablity.-" That's a guess on your part. IMO designing a speaker to be flat and then treating the room if problems pop up (and VMPS rooms also need treating so it's not like the pots counter the need for room treatments) is the way to go. To put pots in the mix to adjust to taste doesn't seem right to me, nor padding down multiple driver sections to match eachother vs. a 2-way that's designed to be level match without padding either section down. If you don't like the top end from a non-adjustable speaker as transparent as the 16 neos in the Alphas then IMO you should choose a diff. front end signal that's more to your liking, not turn down/up the top octave and a half FST. ctviggen, "-That there is no center or surrounds for the Alphas is a huge detriment in my opinion.-" I'm making an Alpha center. The imaging of the Alphas (and the X's to be fair) doesn't need one IMO. I'm doing it for other reasons than my 'need' for one. There's a thread about it (guess where). It should be about $700 finshed. 6 neos and 6 woofers w/ a curved face. It could be made flat face and be a smaller than Alpha monopole surround, but another pair of Alphas would make pretty good surrounds though. hehe $1K cheaper if you build them than the RM-30's list price (secret dealer discounts might level this though) and would take up about the same floor space. I find surrounds to be much less critical though w/ little content nearly as important as the front section and degraded by your ears cupped away from the back. I use Newform Research 645's for surrounds and they blend pretty well with the Alphas. "-However, if you want to make the cabinets yourself, the Alphas are darn cheap.-" If you don't want to make cabinets they're still half price of the X's. Could you afford RMX's and then buy matching center and surround of X's, 30's, or LRC, or new suround dipoles? If you could afford X's themselves you could build 3 pair of Alphas and a center chan. That's 54 neos and 60 woofers. Distortion would be fairly low in that HT room.
