Fitz

Are those decent for music, or more HT oriented?

Yeah, whoever designed the HDMI connector deserves a good . Those locking adapters are indeed kinda pricy (more than the cable), but might be very useful for installations where the cable just won't stay put. Keep us posted on how well they work.

That might be the difference, I never dealt with Mark, but somebody else. The driver in one of my Ref 1s randomly started a buzzing on bass at anything but soft levels, and I had bought them new and this was at a time when I didn't even listen very loud so I knew it wasn't like they were overdriven or anything. The guy I talked to didn't seem to care less and came across as if he was doing me a huge favor just by selling me a replacement driver. I was fine with that since it wasn't that expensive, except that the driver they sent me was for another one of their speakers, and - I'm not making this up - they simply marked out parts of the label with a pen (on the packaging, not the driver itself) and wrote in the details for the driver it was supposed to be, as if I wouldn't notice the difference when I took it out. Then when I obviously complained to them about it, they pretty much just blew me off and wouldn't do anything to resolve the situation. At some point later the buzzing just completely stopped as weirdly as it began, but there was no way I was doing business with them again after that. I'm sure Mark's a great guy and all, but if that's how the regular customer service people will treat you, I want no part of it.

Odd, considering they're one of the few companies where despite liking their products in general, I refuse to do any future business with them because of their "customer service."

Alright now that I have my TV sitting much closer I went and watched GITS SAC 2nd Gig: Individual Eleven, specifically paying attention to image flaws. I only saw a faint amount of color banding in a couple scenes, but the mosquito noise was very noticable nearly all the time, and by far was the biggest flaw in the video quality. I wonder if there are any decent region-free players that have mosquito noise reduction; eventually I would certainly like to see high quality productions like GITS SAC on Blu-Ray (and I mean a proper release, not just an upconverted DVD as I heard the Yukikaze release was...), but some good noise reduction would probably do wonders for all the DVDs I already own many of which I either wouldn't want to buy again or won't get released on Blu-Ray anyways.

Yeah no kidding. Especially once you start moving furniture around like this, you wonder where the hell all this shit came from.

And what if I have?

Mirumu pretty much nailed it. It's not so much about the extra detail on the actual material itself, but getting rid of artifacts that aren't supposed to be part of the video. Lots of sharp, clean lines and big areas of solid color make even minor compression artifacts stand out like a sore thumb.

Not really, there's still very little on bluray (even less so of any interest or at affordable prices), and many of the titles that came out early on have gone OOP. The only one of any real interest for me to re-buy would be FMP: TSR, which is going to be twice what I paid for the DVD version.

Cheap enough to where it makes any sense at all to spend money on a player and replacing DVDs I already have when 90% of what I watch isn't available on BluRay anyways.

:palm:

You're in for a world of fun with that new TV, Steve. I have a Panasonic plasma too, and even though it was on the bottom end of the scale for the models at the time it's still amazing. I only use it with DVDs right now, but hopefully BluRay will eventually get cheap enough for me to give it a try.

And just so everybody can laugh at my ridiculous nearfield speaker placement situation: To give some idea of scale, that's as far away from the speakers as I possibly could get to take the pictures (check out the craptacular barrel distortion!). It's an absolute disaster on the other side of the speakers right now too. I still haven't even gotten my headphone rig hooked back up, or taken down the old shelves I put above where I used to have the workbench.

Yeah dude, it's fine, I'd rather have someone dominate the thread than it wither and die with me being the only one posting. I talk to myself enough as it is.

Oh fuck me this sounds good. I mean like, it's not a subtle or incremental improvement, it sounds completely different now. These speakers have absolutely no right to sound this good being in a nearly square room and too close to the listening position. Initially I wasn't impressed, but as I continued to listen it became apparent all that fuzzy background mush was gone. Soundstage is much smaller, essentially that of the middle of my room, but I think the resonance was just creating the illusion of it being bigger before. Imaging is vastly better; electric instruments have a kind of ambiguity to their precise location, but acoustic instruments and vocals are right fuckin there. I had to make myself turn it off because it's getting late and I don't wanna wake the dead, so I didn't get to test it much with rock except one song. It might be a little more unforgiving on a lot of rock or metal with the lack of any bass boost now, but these things are definitely not bass light even with the stuff done. I was listening to some of a Rachael Yamagata CD I found laying around, and I was in a tranquil state as a fairly slow and gentle song faded out, then when the kick drum started off the next track I damn near jumped out of my seat. No lack of impact for sure.

Heh, yeah, now that you mention it since they are interior doors it's just two thin wood panels with an air gap between them, so it could be doing all kinds of crazy stuff at low frequencies. I think I'm gonna try them out with how I have it now, as I applied the bass cut to 25Hz and below which gave another small improvement to the decay, and used the good old sledgehammer that is EQ to smooth out some of the smaller frequency imbalances caused by this placement. Oddly enough, tuning both separately to be relatively flat does not cause them to suddenly become very irregular when played simultaneously (e.g. centered sounds), as is usually been the case when I've played around like this with box speakers in this room before. I'm gonna give it a listen and see if I can control myself long enough to listen to it for a few days before messing with things. Thanks for the input though, all this talk of basstraps got me to look at the room shape again and mess with the closet doors like that. If this sounds good, then I can start looking at more reasonably sized traps to deal with the other issues.

Doing further experimenting and looking more carefully at the waterfall plots, it looks to be several closely spaced peaks and dips in the ~30-40Hz range, usually with 3 or 4 fairly evenly spaced peaks, but occasionally one larger peak or dip. The biggest one seems to always be between 36-38Hz. I do get one showing up sometimes at 40-41Hz, and occasionally a very minor one at 43Hz. Haven't gotten to making additional length measurements yet to see how these match up to the room shape, but the size I quoted before was a rough estimate which I now think is probably off. I actually haven't been able to reproduce the same results I was getting before wrt to opening the closet door though, so perhaps I was getting a bit loopy after messing with it so long and misreading something. That's not to say I'm not getting any results, actually quite the opposite. I've loosened the hinges enough that I can take them on and off in just a couple minutes, and tested two speaker positions with no doors, both doors closed, left side open, and right side open. So far having no closet doors up gives the quickest decay and more spread out, narrower peaks. Having the right one open performed the worst in both positions, and the left one open or both closed ranked differently between the two. Happily, the position with the speakers closer to a more normal spot gives the best result of the two I've tested. For reference, the bass frequencies in the 30-40Hz range hit between 75-84dB with the fullrange pink noise being set at 75dB, with the average level higher in the first test position. With no doors and the second test position, the highest peak in that range after 400ms is at 56.1dB, compared to 65.7dB with both doors closed. The frequency response is damn near identical regardless of the doors' presence except for a couple dB rise or dip in the midbass and treble (less than what happens from moving the speakers an inch or changing toe-in), so there appears to be no real negative effects of removing the doors, just the more rapid bass decay. Gonna save these measurements this time in case I want to reference them again, and proceed with changing speaker placement with the closet doors off. Since I'm getting much better results from this position than I did before even with the doors closed, I suspect I may have hit a good spot by chance, so I'm going to mark it and work from there. It looks like I'll still need a bit of eq to smooth out the rest of the spectrum in this arrangement though, at least until I have the time/money to make or buy some bass traps to do it the right way.

Another finding: depending on how I have the closet open (two sliding doors), I can get a significant increase in decay of the standing wave, although still far from ideal (instead of being 10dB down at a given point, it's up to 20dB down). It's actually two waves somewhere between 30Hz and 40Hz, because I remember I found some configurations where I got the massive peak to collapse into two narrow peaks (as measured on the waterfall plot, frequency response still has a big hump in that range); I'll make note of what they are on the next round of experimenting, I think one matched up to the axial mode in the direction the speakers fire, the other didn't have any obvious correlation (note to self: measure the distance of the short passage leading to the hall and factor it into the width of the room). Unfortunately the effect of the "closet bass trap" was strongest with the speakers further back beside the TV, which doesn't image as well (it works like a massive baffle blocking reflections, rather than with the speakers forward where they can reflect off the stuff behind them and the TV itself), but I'm not giving up yet. I might try taking both doors off and seeing how that effects it. I wonder if the cavity is working like a helmholtz resonator, or just altering the room dimensions enough to attenuate the standing wave. Taking both doors off should provide some insight into that, hopefully it's the latter and I can just leave it that way with my AKG banner serving to hide the messy contents.

Pics or Choose wisely.

It's custom built using a mini-itx board, and I don't really remember where I got all the parts from, but here's what it looks like nekkid: It's smaller than a phonebook, uses less than 30 watts idle, quiet as whatever harddrive you choose to put in, and is running ArchLinux. I think I paid around $450 for the whole thing, including the 1TB harddrive which was when they still cost ~$200. Of course that's not factoring in the time for the DIY modifications necessary due to the lies I was told by the place I bought the chassis, or the time it takes to install and setup the OS.

Yeah, I have a crappy Linksys router I commandeer from work for this purpose, just have to make a couple changes to my hosts files and it works fine. Eventually I'll probably get around to changing the dynamic IP range and static IP assignments on it so I can just plug it in and go anytime. Never had access to another network at any of these events to even try seeing if I could get it to talk to the main network, though NAT probably gets in the way of trying to log onto the hotel network properly from behind a 2nd router as Tyll mentioned. The cool thing about this particular Squeezebox setup is it doesn't even require the computer to be on to listen to my music, because Slimserver is running on a very small, fanless fileserver. It has less flexibility in changing/adding storage space than a regular NAS unit, but adds more flexibility in being able to run anything I want on it, such as Slimserver. Yeah this is one'ah dem there fancy shindings, so ah reckon ah aint be wearin' mah ass-kickin' shoes. But fuck the usual factors, make yourself available to get down here again.

Upper corners I can do 3 of 4 (right side behind the speakers, that extends out a little to meet the hallway so there's not a proper corner there), but considering that this is dealing on the deep end of the scale with massive wavelengths, it would definitely need some measurements to back it up before I invest any time or money in it. That's why I didn't really consider it much before, because of the scale required to deal with frequencies this low (the already fairly big 2' long foam corner wedges on that site from the picture only show ratings down to 125Hz that I can find).

It would need to cause some major absorption as low as 32Hz to be effective here, is there any way to get that with bass traps without something obscenely large? Plain foam in any practical size wouldn't be thick enough at those wavelengths, but I've no experience with actual bass traps or helmholtz resonators, so I have no idea how well they would work for me. I have some flexibility in placing things thanks to the new furniture arrangement, but not necessarily in the most convenient places (both corners by the listening position are no go, although one might eventually get freed up if I switch to a normal CD rack instead of the spinner rack now that I have room).

I normally have the speakers straight up and down, and already tried no toe-in at several points. No toe-in causes a tilt EQ reducing the higher frequencies without affecting the bass, but makes no difference otherwise, and perpendicular or tilted doesn't seem to significantly affect the frequency response or decay either. Believe me when I say I've done a lot of expermenting with positioning front/back, left/right, closer/further apart, straight/tilted, flat/toed-in, etc within any reasonable area around the new speaker location. I have the Sound Anchor stands, so I can tilt them pretty far forward or backward. This isn't really an issue of them being nearfield so much as their current position in the room is hitting the room modes in all the wrong ways. I actually first auditioned these in a very nearfield setup (maybe 4 feet away?), which had the most realistic imaging I've ever experienced and haven't yet been able to reproduce in my own setup, but the bass wasn't overwhelming at all (it was in a very large room however, inside a furniture store to be precise).

Yeah well I'm sure if I could find a good spot for the sub, it would sound a hell of a lot nicer than the boom-boom-bass the Maggies are making trying to play the 30-40Hz range in their current position. I never would've imagined I'd be having that problem with these speakers.