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.

I know with my 5' double-horns it made a big, big, difference.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oils do give a better finish, too bad that they are becoming harder to find. Did you stain the wood at all? -Linc