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Finally finished, at least as far as I'm going. Look decent, but I will NEVER use water based Minwax poly again. That stuff is just complete junk. Back to the oil based for me. I never could get a good finish with it on these. They look decent from the listening position, which is good enough. I found on carpet they are very front heavy, and ended up putting the rubber feet that comes in the kit on the front of the cabinets (bottom of course) and leaving the rear ones off. This makes them nearly level front to back. Maybe some spikes would be in order, but for now the feet will do. On to the sound. Never having heard a pair of these I was surprised by the bass. Very tight and low. Dire Straits sounds very nice!!! The soundstage is quite good and vocals sound very nice. All in all a good speaker. They definitely blow my Heresy's out of the water. FWIW I'm running the 1st order Xover, but have the 2nd order bits on the board as well with euro-style connectors if I ever want to try it. Thanks Fred for the cabinets. No this is not my stereo setup, BTW. My good stuff (to me) is in the bedroom, so I'll have to move some of it out to the living room.
Have you tried moving them out further from the front wall and away from the tv cabinet to see how that effects imaging? I know with my 5' double-horns it made a big, big, difference.
Nice work, Shane. The original design used a 2nd order crossover in the woofer section and a 1st order for the tweeter. While Wayne was testing them he tried them with a 1st order woofer crossover by removing the shunt capacitor from the circuit, and he preferrred the sound. I prefer the 2nd order. The 1st order sounds too forward to me, but I prefer a more relaxed sounding speaker than most people I know. You should try the 2nd order sometime.
Thanks. I plan on moving them around some. I just finished them last night so I haven't had much time to try. CSI Miami was getting in the way at the time! One thing that concerns me is that on the thicker carpet we have they are fairly unstable, so I'll either have to make a large base for them or go to spikes if I move them out where they might be hit.
Thanks Fred. I haven't tried the 2nd order on the woofer yet. I have the shunt capacitor and everything on the xover board, so I'd just need to add two more wires to connect and I'd be there. I'll listen to them with the 1st order for a month or so, then switch them to hear the difference.
Mine are stable on on hardwood or thin carpets, but I don't have any small kids or pets who might push them over (my wife and the housekeeper have been cautioned to never touch the speakers). The simplest option would be to cut a couple of pieces of mdf or plywood about four inches wider and deeper than the speakers, set these bases on the carpet, then set the speakers on the bases. If you have small kids the preferred way would be to make the bases, remove the feet from the speakers, then screw the bases to the speakers from underneath.
I'd assume that the big TV screen would provide a pretty nasty 1st reflection point. Try hanging a thick comforter over the cabinet once to see if anything changes. Anything large between speakers has the potential to really screw up imaging and depth of soundstage. Just some basic room acoustics pointers that have worked for me in the past.
Thanks for the idea. I've thought of doing that before. Problem is that I'm sharing the family room, so audio gets a second fiddle position to everything else. If you think the living room looks bad, my other stuff is in our bedroom. I've learned to live with it so far. We will be actively looking to purchase a house this fall/winter and one of the criteria is that I at least have one wall that is soley for audio equipment.
Last year, I moved from a 4 bedroom, 2,600 sq ft. house to a 1,100 sq. ft apartment. There is literally no room at all to set up my fairly large Hi-eff(ish) horn system. So, it has remained boxed for the last year. I finally started to sell off most of it because I won't be able to afford a proper sized room for at least another 6 months to year. The upside of this upheaval is that it gave me an opportunity to completely rethink my approach to audio. My next system will be an all-out assault on "having it all". Hence, my popping up here to learn everything I can about line arrays. My single-drive double horns were absolutely killer on midrange tone and overall coherence. Vocals, wood instruments, etc. were just so rich and textured. Even dynamics were pretty good. But, bass and bass impact were short of startling even with the matching subwoofers. Also, I want more than "head-in-a-vise" sweet spot and soundstage/imaging so common to horns.
The line array beats the Klipsch! Klipsch tried very hard to keep the distortion low by keeping the driver excursion small, but the line array has even less. Do they draw as much juice for the same volume? Oils do give a better finish, too bad that they are becoming harder to find. Did you stain the wood at all? -Linc
Well, the Klipsch Heresy's are not the end all, be all of Klipsch design as we all know. They lack in the bass dept for sure due to the small cabinet space. Far as I can tell they are pretty well matched for sensitivity. I did stain the cabinets. Used Minwax oil based pecan. It's a nice neutral color. The veneer on the birch ply was not the best, and looks decent everywhere except the front baffles. No biggie. I may paint the fronts with a truck bed liner and a small pore foam roller for a fine textured finish if I get ambitious. I used a water based poly over it and having never used that product before I will use the oil based poly or some kind of tung oil finish next time becuase that's what I'm used to. The water based dries too quickly and made it hard to get an even finish. You only notice it if you're up within 2-3 feet of the cabinets with the right light, but from the listening position they look fine, which is OK for me.
For fun I pulled the speakers out about 2 feet from the wall, toe-d in about 20 degrees, and about 9 feet apart. My listening position is about 10 feet. WOW!! These sounded quite nice. Very big stage, no head-in-a-vice sweet spot. Everything opened up. The bass got a little boomy so I think they would sound better at 15 or so inches from the wall and possibly another foot apart. Unfortunately it was only a temporary situation, but it showed me the potential the ART Arrays have given the right setup.