I really appreciate Wes taking that leap of faith to share a room with me. I think this was his first "big" show, and he certainly had all his ducks in a row. My wife and I, and our friends, really enjoyed being with Wes. His little DAC is just killer, and it was an honor to share the room with him and the D100 Mk 2.
And thanks for coming by, and for your kind words, Blooze and DaveC and Tyson. Thanks for the pics, Dave!
A few things were not working as well as they should have in my room, and I didn't figure out what was going on until too late. Specifically, the bass was too thick and the dynamics were disappointing, but it wasn't until after the show that I figured out the cause.
Right after show hours on Sunday, I wheeled my speakers down the hall to room 1130, the big room at the far end of the hall, showcasing the Galibier turntable. There we hooked 'em up to a pair of Atma-Sphere amps, I learned that the speakers I'd brought were much better suited for a big room.
In that big room, the bass balance was correct and the dynamics came back. Here is what I think had been happening back in my room:
First, I had under-estimated the amount of boundary reinforcement that room generated, and/or over-estimated my ablility to deal with it.
Second, in that rather reflective room, the extra reverberant energy from the side-firing array had the effect of raising the in-room noise floor. So dynamic contrast was diminished. In the big room, the extra reverberant energy was more clearly beneficial, as there wasn't a similar negative side effect.
In retrospect, one of my monopolar models (like the Rhythm Prisms or Jazz Modules) would have been a better match for my little room. I was all excited and wanted to showcase my latest & greatest, but in this case I should have listened to my own propaganda about what works well in small rooms (namely, fairly tight radiation pattern control).
So in the future I will try to do a better job of matching speakers to rooms, and save my big bipolars (twisted or otherwise) for big rooms.
Not that the side-firing array was without merit; I had a couple of people remark that the sense of envelopment was like a good surround system. Along the way, several people who had spent a lot of time with horn systems (including manufacturing them) commented that they were not used to horns imaging like mine did, which indicated that the side-firing array was not degrading the imaging.
