| Cure for brightness [message #64876] |
Wed, 24 November 2010 13:05  |
notben
Messages: 11
Registered: October 2009
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Chancellor |
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Hello gentlemen.
I have been living with a pair of 2pi monitor speakers that I built with birch ply for about six months now. Overall, they have at least a couple hundred hours or more on them.
I absolutely love their detail and resolution. The response is quick, the bass is clean, the midrange is extremely detailed with excellent definition in what I call the transition zones ( around 250, 2k & 6K hz respectively ). Overall I am very pleased. I especially love tube rolling with these speakers because I can instantly hear the dominant characteristics of different tubes. Very revealing for a monitor speaker.
However I still find them to be a tad bright and even a little fatiguing. Here is how I have tested the speakers to see if it is actually the speaker. I have tested them with two tube amps and two SS amp, two different tube preamps and one SS tuner. I have run them in three different rooms: my music room which is lightly treated with bass traps and some ceiling treatment (this is also my guitar room), my study (which is a very flat and dead room ), and my living room ( which is tolerable at best).
I have also cycled through different speaker cables -- mogami, anti-cable, tributaries; and different RCA's -- anti-cable, monster, radio shack.
The brightness follows the speaker.
So now I want to try a few things to see if I can find the culprit or maybe tame it a little bit.
1. I am thinking about trying a different cap on the tweeter. It currently has the 10uf Solen that shipped with it. I may try an Obbligato Gold Premium, a Mundorf Supreme (if I feel like spending $90), or maybe a motor run if I can mount it in the speaker.
2. Could I have damaged one of the tweeters? I can't hear any difference between the two speakers. One of my preamps, a Bottlehead Foreplay, has separate volume controls and I can't hear any real difference between the two, but I don't want to rule out anything.
So, I could try a new or different set of tweeters.
3. The most drastic and time consuming thing would be to build some MDF cabinets to compare.
Any ideas or opinions of what I could try or test please share them. Thanks.
- Benton
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| Re: Cure for brightness [message #64880 is a reply to message #64879] |
Wed, 24 November 2010 14:58  |
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Wayne Parham
Messages: 18787
Registered: January 2001
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Illuminati (33rd Degree) |
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Some oil-filled motor runs are pretty good, reasonably priced and tend to warm up the sound. I'd be interested to hear what you think of them. Be sure to get an oil-filled can, because there are other kinds of motor run caps these days, most of them using some kind of plastic dielectric. Some of them are pretty cheap and nasty. So when searching for oil-filled motor-run caps, don't just look for "motor run", also look for "oil" or "dielectric fluid".
I don't think you'll hear a difference with a Mundorf M-Series because it is basically the same as the stock cap. But the price isn't too bad either, about the same as the Solen that came with the kit. The Supreme and some of their other series are more expensive, and I'm not sure it makes sense to use in this speaker. Guess you could if you wanted to.
The Obbligato might sound different to you, but my guess is it will sound the same, or at least too close to call. It's like the Auricaps in price and, I suspect, in sonic character.
I've used Audio Note capacitors, Mundorf Supremes, Jantzen Superior caps and Auricaps and find each of them to be nice, but then again at those prices, you would expect them to be. I tend to reserve these higher-priced caps for the speakers with premium driver options. The JBL and AE drivers are pretty expensive, and justify using capacitors in the $20 to $200 range, at least in my mind. The speaker drivers cost several hundred bucks, so a hundred or two hundred dollars spent in the crossover parts is probably well-deserved. But to be honest, I can't see spending more on the passive components than the drivers cost.
That said, none of the capacitors you've mentioned cost more than the drivers, and I wouldn't wince at their price tags. I think that Obbligato is the most expensive of the three you've mentioned, at about $25.00. The Mundorf MKP is about the same as the Solen, about $7.50. Motor runs can be bought for just about any price, from less than ten bucks to who knows what. But none of these is really outrageously priced. Might be worthwhile to try them all, especially if you already have them on hand.
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