Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Sonic Paradise Returns

I played some FM radio last night and this morning, KPAC Classical Music.  It was beautifully spacious sounding and I was relieved of the chore of choosing music.  It was below freezing cold outside, but much like paradise inside with the living room freshly cleaned after a party on Sunday night.  Heated and humidified with Windtricity (TM, wind farm electricity purchased through municipal power company) as that is the only kind of electricity I buy (helping to make Texas #1 in both windpower and sonic excellence).

The fun is back in living room system now.  I think the fun had gone by December of last year, when accumulated adjustments had crushed the deep bass and neutered the supertweeters.  Now I've restored the bass, mainly by cutting the subwoofer crossover point way back down to 85 Hz, allowing the level to be raised significantly.  And I've restored the supertweeter levels to a very high level, attempting to use a lower  augmentation frequency, but now almost back to where it was before.  And I've moved the listening spot 6 inches closer to the speakers, almost exactly giving me a "perfect" 60 degree listening angle.

You don't appreciate how a wider stereo image sounds just by thinking of hearing sound at the periphery.  The main virtue is being able to hear more clear separation near the middle.

I noticed little if any sound coming from the supertweeters (15.5kHz crossover point, but you can hear lower frequencies if they are loud enough) on the FM, probably mainly thanks to the modified XDR-F1HD tuner being so incredibly quiet.  It occurs to me it would be nice to have remote control switch to control supertweeters (on/off).  That would require either hooking a serial controller to the Behringer crossover, or using something to switch the line or amplifier level signals, such as my ABX test box.  I have a wide range of line level remote control gizmos, but unsure if I want to put any old piece on the high rez supertweeter line.

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