Monday, October 23, 2006

Baddy's upstairs rig


The upstairs rig

This is the upstairs rig, which is a pair of fullrangers in nice cabs from middle branch furniture (Marlboro, NY), with helper tweeters (still working out the kinks there, the new peerless HDS tweeters will be in service there soon enough). Down below, we have Eminence Magnum 15HO drivers in sealed cabs (courtesy of your badness)... but they're not running yet. They used to be in the big rig, until I got those neat-o rethms to play with. Mostly this rig is used for movies, via the Motorola DCP-500 receiver: a high power class D receiver with a linear power supply and tripath chips for $99 shipped via ebay.... I have several of them, what a deal! MSRP was $900, but they weren't marketable. (expensive all-in one/cable box). Sounds very good.

But that rig has a ways to go yet, lacking the refinement of the big rig (and the price tag). Speaking of the big rig...
Here we have the latest change, the heils on the rethms. A little doublesided tape has superceded the stands (how sad!) which are now on the porch of forgotten hifi. The expected improvement in wavefront integration was more than, well, expected... we're havin' some lovely stuff here boys and girls!

Keep tuned, and you'll know when I do.....
And oh yeah, adjusted the preamp a bit too....

Monday, October 16, 2006

Nifty stands

Oooh look at the cosmetics matching! The columnar stands are oak baseplates (3 layers laminated, 2 rectangular, one circular, all with bevels, sanded and shellac'd), the top are a combination of oak (rectangular) and ply (circular) with the same treatment. The circular pieces on the top and bottom have the tube inset into them (Sched. 40 PVC, painted, filled with expanding urethane foam for rigidity and damping)

The stands are rather tall (as you can see) but that allows the AMTs room to breathe (they're bipolar). XO is still active first order, but moved up to 6500Hz, with silver mica caps doing the filter honors. You can see the Transcendent OTL SE driving the Rethms, and the Fi X is configured for 4 ohm output via magnequest OPTs, driving the AMTs.

Next to the transcendent are a set of Paul Speltz's Zero Autoformers: nifty little devices that allow you to multiply or divide your speaker impedance. Adding a transformer to an OTL may seem silly, but OTLs are best suited to high loads, and these autoformers are a more ideal case of transformer than the normal higher ratio stepdowns that must handle DC current used in typical SET. We'll see if they do what we want.

Next post: The bedroom rig: where the groove happens!

Thursday, October 12, 2006

At the desk of the badman

The Galacticons in situ. Sounding good, driven off the little Sonic Impact T-amp. Obviously level limited, due to the low sensitivity of the drivers (about 85dB) and the low output of the T-amp, but that's a non-issue given that it's at work. You can see that I have a window, I am not made for cubicular existence. They look a whole lot better than their predecessors, which used a pair of WR125ST per side, right on top of each other, and a ratshack linaeum supertweeter... they sound darn fine, do the others, but looked like heck, given that they were some of my first cabinets, and were just test-boxes.

These sound very good indeed, however if I were to listen to them out of the nearfield, I'd have to add baffle step compensation, (which, imo, is best, most affordably and most easily accomplished line-level).

Wednesday, October 11, 2006


Here they are: the galacticons! CSS (www.creativesound.ca) FR125 fullrange drivers, with Adire's XBL^2 (tm) motor structure, in sealed metal enclosures- damped with a special compound, the structure is overall comprised of: aluminum, plywood, soft damping compound loaded with sand. They have a foam liner for acoustic absorbtion, which should be plenty effective at the frequencies which this spherical enclosure would tend to reinforce. The cable is, of course, all Poth, hardwired. Specifically, a 4 wire braid of 18 awg solid core copper, high purity and annealed several times during production), intended to match this design.

We'll see how they do on my desk at work (www.ceaemployment.com, I'm the Sales, Marketing, and Website Coordinator in my day job, Poth Audio is a nights and weekends proposition).

Friday, October 06, 2006

Hi kids!


Welcome to my Blog. You will here be able to view the terribly interesting details of my menial existence. On the plus side, you will not be charged a fee nor aquire syphillis from viewing this content, so you may as well read some. The vast majority of the content herein shall be of an audio nature. Shown here is the current setup I'm using, but this setup is highly adaptive, hence all the gear everywhere. The silver columnar speakers are "Rethm The Second" cabinets with Fostex FF225K drivers, the tweeters are the heil AMT1. They're actively crossed over and all driven by SET.

Of course, there's a big sub there, and all manner of wild Pothy goodness (see www.pothaudio.com for more pothy goodness).

So.... enjoy! Right now the projects on the plate are: stands for the heils that match the rethms (oak and silver-painted PVC pipe, filled with expanding foam for damping), the "Galacticons", sperical metal enclosure full range speakers painted to look... galactic (the name is derived from the "Galaxis Space Scanner", which is the Lockheed Martin surplus part I used for the enclosure). After that, most likely, a phono stage.

Right now being played with are crossover points for the speakers, positioning, and which amps do best where: I have SET in both transformer coupled and OTL varieties (Fi X and Bottlehead SEX both with magnequest trafos, and a transcendent OTL SE).....

Dunno if this was interesting to you, if not, why are you this far down?