[SteveFord]

I like what you did with the minis!
How do you like the sound quality?

[Paddlefoot]

Hey Steve, these sounded great, much better than i expected, in looks and sound. i contacted Grant at MYE stands and ask him if he could do the tops for me, he said he would, i sent the tops to him for measurements, he returned them. short thereafter they came to South Carolina, the wife loved the looks !

[josh358]

Mye stands for Mini Maggies! Very cool.

[josh358]

Got my new projector and screen installed:

[SteveFord]

Josh is living large!

[JakeJ]

That's awesome!  Sound Labs up front and looks like Magnepan 20.1 behind them?  Ahem...that is not how you are supposed to setup you home theater speakers. 

[josh358]

Josh is living large!

Hey, don't rub it in, Atkins is helping with that.

Seriously, my first 3D projector -- "Gravity" left me crosseyed but was a lot of fun.

[josh358]

That's awesome!  Sound Labs up front and looks like Magnepan 20.1 behind them?  Ahem...that is not how you are supposed to setup you home theater speakers. 

Heh, I wish. They're an old pair of Tympani IVA's, the socks are off because I got them used and have been doing some repairs.

One nice thing about the IVA's is that you can use them in split configuration with the woofer panels behind the mid-tweet panels in a runty room like this, my old 1D's would never have fit.

This would be a terrible arrangement for a real home theater since you can't sit to the side without blocking the view, but it works fine for one or two people so it's ideal if you're like me and your friends all hate you.

Here are the IVA's with the panels side by side:



No room for a screen at all if I do that!

[JakeJ]

That's still awesome!   I have a friend that has a pair (not sure which model) and they sounded great when I got a chance to hear them.

I like the fact the IV A woofer and mid/tweeter panels can be disconnected, many sonic advantages to that I'm sure.

[josh358]

For me, the main advantage is that I can fit them in an undersized room! My old 1-D's, which were also 3 panels that couldn't be separated, would never fit in a room like this.

Otherwise I think the main acoustic advantage is that you can have much more woofer area than in a large single-panel speaker, so they're suited to larger rooms (or with EQ cleaner bass in small ones like mine). You can also detach the MT's from the woofer panels so that the virbrations don't get transmitted, you can open up a bit of a space if the backwave is getting trapped, and you can play with the toe-in of the woofers, which changes the sound dramatically.

[JakeJ]

Thanks for the reply josh358.  Very interesting.  I have always wanted to try Maggies but have not really had the necessary space to do it.

[josh358]

Yeah, size is problem for so many of us. I'm lucky to have a dedicated room but even then my room is really too small and it's been a real challenge to fit everything in. I have a pair of diffusers up now, mounted on rails so I can slide them and experiment with their position, and they make a huge improvement -- my small room (13' and 17' deep, 14' wide) is starting to sound like a much bigger one and I was able to push the M-T panels closer to the wall.



Of course these are almost the biggest speakers they've ever made, the .7's are really small and apparently really nice (I haven't heard them yet), though you still do have to pull them out from the wall.

Have you considered the on-walls? They seem to sell mostly to the home theater crowd but they sound comparable to their mid range floor standers and they're great solutions for space problems.

I think Magnepan should take some .7's and put them in enclosures and sell them as against-the-wall speakers -- they'd look more like conventional box speakers, but they'd have the planar sound and people wouldn't have to mount them like the on-walls. Not that that's much trouble but I suspect it dissuades some people from buying them.

[GregDunn]

Hmmm... no posts recently.  Hope I don't get accused of necro-posting.   

Here are my newly refurbished Tympani 1C speakers back from a fresh factory refurb and with new-style socks.  And yes, the perspective is confusing; they are about 4-5 feet from the rear wall and experimentally positioned to try to improve the dispersion.  Wish I had a wider room, but they still sound decent at this point.

[SteveFord]

That would be the copyrighted Greg Dunn Wall Of Sound?

[josh358]

Wow, excellent. I put black socks on my 1-D's when I replaced them years ago . . .

[HAL]

The Megaliths.  GT Audioworks 20" ribbon array, BG Neo10 array and 6x12 OB H-Frame Servo subs.  Using the dspMusikLCD 2x16 channel digital crossover.

[GregDunn]

That would be the copyrighted Greg Dunn Wall Of Sound?

I was tempted to put "Also Sprach Zarathustra" on when I first hooked them up.   


Yeah, I saw several examples of modern grill cloth when I was at the factory last summer, and it just seemed to me that the black was a good choice.  The tan/gold cloth as they were originally built turned dingy after a while, so the white was right out.  The grey just didn't seem to work for me, even though it looks nice on the panels.

[HAL]

I did with mine! 

[josh358]

The Megaliths.  GT Audioworks 20" ribbon array, BG Neo10 array and 6x12 OB H-Frame Servo subs.  Using the dspMusikLCD 2x16 channel digital crossover.

Wow, must be spectacular. How do the OB woofers blend with the Neo 10's? I have a stack of Neo 8's to replace the midrange drivers in my Tympani IVA's, I'm restoring the bass panels as we speak and then I'll have to lay in a third power amp.

What's the dspMusikLCD 2x16? This is the first I've heard of it. I have a MiniDSP Open DRC-DA8 for XO and EQ, but I've been comparing it to some other converters and I'm disappointed in the sonics, so thinking about alternatives. One possibility would be to run Acourate on my computer, but I'd need 6 channels of DA -- I could buy a 4 channel Lynx card and add it to my current 2 channel card, or buy an old Aurora 8, or try to find a used e28, now that it's been replaced by the e38 -- although they don't seem to come up very often.

[HAL]

The open baffle Neo10's blend very well with the open baffle servo subs. 

The dspMusikLCD is either an 2x8 channel or 2x16 channel digital crossover that used HiRez ADC's and DAC's for processing at 24bit/192KHz for the system.  I developed the crossover for my speakers with the 16 channel since it is running 14 of 16 channels driving the system.  There are 22 amp channels driving the speakers. That is 10 Parasound Halo A23's and 2 Rythmik Audio HX800 servo amps.  Lots of headroom.

The dspMusikLCD was developed by Danville Signal Processing, Inc for many uses and a very good one is a digital crossover.  The software programming environment was developed by DSP Concepts.  I am a licensed developer for the system, so I develop the applications for the units.  Works with Windows , OSX and Linux over USB2.

Here is one thread where I discuss it:

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=142585.0