More speaker fine tuning

Some of the response curves showed a bit of peaking above 6khz, that had me concerned that I was too much on-axis with the acoustats.  One needs to be slightly off axis for the best sound, this can be tuned best by ear, but measurement sometimes helps too.  I have felt quite often in the past few months that my close-up position was too much on-axis, having a slightly peaky sound.

So I moved both speakers slightly straighter, by first angling out the super tweeters about a half inch, then moving the speakers to match.

After doing this I also measured the speaker distances to the nose-position microphone.  I was very surprised to find how short the distances are now, about 40 inches to the center of the panels.  But the left side was clearly shorter, I first measured 36 inches but 38 seemed more accurate, whereas the right side was at 40 inches.

So I moved the left speaker back as much as I could, which wasn't much, hardly an inch.  When doing the full system response curves, there was still a slight gap between the impulse in the right and left channels, the left channel still seemed to measure about 0.03 ms faster as if it were about 6mm closer.  BTW, that is a fraction of an inch, about 1/4 inch.

I decided to fudge this one with the Behringer DEQ.  I dialed in short delay of 0.03 in the left panel and  added 0.03 to the existing delay for the left tweeter also, figuring it might be more delayed now.  It seemed that after I set the "unlink" option globally, I could set short delays separately for each channel. I had not figured that out before.

This yielded a measurement in which the impulses for the two channels exactly lined up.  But in listening, it seemed slightly skewed to the right.  So actually I reversed the DEQ setting, dialing in short delay for the right panels only of 0.03 ms, and undoing the delays I had previously added on the left.  That sounded correct.  I can't explain why, perhaps I don't have the microphone positioned correctly or my head is slightly asymmetrical.  In principle I could have moved the panels.  I chose not to do measurements after making this final tweak by ear, since the measurements seemed to steer me wrong on this one.

Another change I made was to reduce the bass levels on both sides.  The bass has been sounding a bit boomy, and the measurements showed  a rise in bass below 80 Hz and the left channel rising above the right in the bass below about 40 Hz, so I took about 1.5 dB off the right sub and 3.0 dB off the left sub.  That seemed to make both the measurements and the sound better, but I subsequently noticed that the Tact measurements are inconsistent, even averaging 40 trials, sometimes the right channel exceeds the level of bass in the left channel all the way down to 20 Hz, and other times left channel has more below 50 Hz.  So some additional relative subwoofer adjusting may be required, about a dB or two, but the current adjustment is an improvement in reducing the boominess if not level matching.