Well.... after almost 8 months of planning, waiting for parts to arrive, waiting for my cabinet-builder friend to help me, and then the finishing process being interrupted numerous times by the more important task of being a new father I can finally say that I fired up my Premium Stage Four Pi's the other night! I still need to paint and cover the grill frames, but the speakers themselves are done.So far, I've just set them up in my relatively unfinished basement (it does have carpet on the floor and insulation between the studs on the walls, but that's about it) with my old HK 730 receiver (45W x2, dual-mono power supplies) and CD player. I'm not sure how long it takes to break them in, but so far they've had about 5 hours of white noise run through them and a few hours of music as well. Seems to be a bit of upper bass boominess which I think has more to do with lack of break-in time, but also I think I need to add more polyester batting to the cabinets. I only had enough to do the back wall and the bottom of the cabinets, so more insulation is definately in order. I might also reduce the padding on PSD2002 in the crossover because the highs are a little softer than I'd like; or at least they are right now. Not going to deviate much though from the crossover design until I've put the proper amount of fill in the cabinets and have broken the drivers in adequately.
With a little tweaking of the treble on my amp these things sure do sing, though! This is my first experience with high-efficiency speakers in my own home and I think I'm finally getting that tactile,
"sounds like live" sound that I've been wanting from my system. Evenutally I might upgrade to a more powerful amp, but so far I really like what I'm hearing. I took some quick snapshots with my wife's camera, so if she fills up the film in the next few days with baby photos I'll post some pictures up on the net somewhere. I hope to also have the grilles completed by that time as well.Thanks to Wayne Parham and George Duemm (replay) for all your help in answering my questions. I'm sure there will be more!
Later,
Colin
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