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Great Plains November 2004 Audio Club meeting photos [message #45790]

Sun, 14 November 2004 20:14

Wayne Parham
Messages: 18782
Registered: January 2001

Illuminati (33rd Degree)

The Great Plains Audio Club meeting was held at Bob and Katya Soden's house on November 13 at 2:00pm. It was a great time with lots of good food, sounds and great company. Bob and his lovely wife Katya prepared chicken and shrimp and a whole lot of other goodies. I always love our little get-togethers and this one was another very fine time.

http://www.pispeakers.com/Events/2004_November_GPAC_01.jpg

Left to right, front to back: Bob Soden, Mark Margiotta, Bill Wassilak, Norris Wilson and Forrest Merrill

http://www.pispeakers.com/Events/2004_November_GPAC_02.jpg

Left to right: Katya Soden, Alona Parham, Vlad Soden and Dawne Margiotta

Bob's home theater system is a work in progress. It sounds nice, with plenty of hardware to make movies jump out at you. His speakers are home built, and he has just swapped out all the drivers. He chose Electro-Voice for woofers and subs, Eminence for mids and Beyma for tweeters. Right now, they don't really have any crossovers, just a protection cap on the tweeters. But he has asked me to look at his driver selection and come up with a crossover. I think with his driver choices, I'll have good parts to work with.

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Bob's Home Theater System

Forrest Merrill brought his Jolida tubed CD player, Mark Margiotta brought his Music Reference RM-9 and I brought Paramours, a NAD preamp, Sony CD player and Rega turntable. I didn't want to lug a pair of seven π cornerhorns, but I did bring the π mids, tweeter and crossover from a pair of seven π's. So we were able to try different combinations of systems and components.

http://www.pispeakers.com/Events/2004_November_GPAC_05.jpg

Front to back: Music Reference RM-9, NAD C-160 and Jolida tubed CD player
π 250/1.6kHz three-way crossover on the left

http://www.pispeakers.com/Events/2004_November_GPAC_06.jpg

Tubes and Horns setup and running

Naturally, the tubes / horns system sounded different than the solid state / direct radiator system did. But both were quite satisfying. Bob's homebrew speakers aren't quite done, so the tweeters were about 10dB hot, but I thought with the Jolida tubed CD player, they balanced each other out nicely.

What we did to re-connect the speakers for use with horns was to use the π 250/1.6kHz crossover to drive the mids and tweeters, and used the crossover's woofer output to drive the EV woofer in Bob's speakers. We placed the midhorn and tweeter on top, which was a little bit far for the 250Hz crossover, but it still sounded very nice. Everything came together and the system filled the room, with what seemed like a wall to wall "sweet spot."

Bob's speakers are nice too. He has chosen good components, and they are arranged well in the box so they will turn out very nice. Even in unfinished form, they sound pretty good. The two Beyma slot tweeters are mounted one on top of the other, directly between two Eminence LA6-MB mids. The mids will be run pretty much all out, like a full range system. They rolloff fairly steeply at 5kHz, right where the Beyma's need to come on. So the electrical slope will be made to match the slope of the mids; Should work out very nicely.