Sonic's System

Hi Zonees

After describing my experience in trying to tame Flutterechoes to Valentin (Mediapet), here is a fuller account of what happened back then.

This was from the time Sonic was just learning the Tune but still without understanding how Michael's gear differed from conventional contoured foam panel treatments and such.

Sonic was asked to help with a slap echo problem in a hard concrete room taller and a bit larger than what I have now. It had a large glassed window on one wall (left open), an opening into a dining area on another wall and there was a small alcove too.

The owner was being driven crazy by a slap/flutter echo at the top of the two long parallel walls about 6 ft down the 25 foot length. It was a double slap echo -- you stand between the spots and clap your hands and you got a "clap-crackkkkk", it rang. Sometimes in a different spot the "kkkk" echo came from the opposite side.
You can even hear it when speaking in the room. The music was effected too with a colouration in the upper mids/lower treble.

This audiophile had big heavy tall speakers and big amps with cables that had lots of boxes attached to them.

OK -- to work. Slap echoes arise from two hard parallel walls. Damp one side and the problem goes away (or so I thought). With some help with bamboo pointers, we determined the point of the slap echoes to some accuracy. Moved away from that point and claps were clean.

Satisfied we found the spot, up went contoured absorptive foam. CLAP! It was still there but the point of slap echo now moved to a spot beyond the foam covered area. So we put another foam piece on the opposite wall facing the spot. CLAP! The thing ran the other way! No...and its getting worse. We ended up with more foam but no matter what we did, the slap echo was still there. At best the "kkkkkk" ringing echo was gone. By now the top of the room was getting pasted with foam and the audiophile's wife appeared like she wanted to poison Sonic.

Consoling ourselves that the worse of the "kkkkk" was gone we started to pack up. I move the tall ladder to the side to pack up the tools. The ladder was open and between the two walls where the "Crack" was worst, closer to one wall. Absentmindedly, Sonic clapped. And....CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! not one bit of flutter echo.

Move the ladder out of the room. Clap!Crack! Ladder back, and CLAP!

When we closed the windows, the "crack" was lessened dramatically. At the time, this made no sense to Sonic. Shouldn't a closed room cause more echo problems than an open one?

Not so as I understand it now. A closed room is simpler to deal with than one with lots of arches and openings because pressure zones leak away or move in odd patterns. The owner of that hourse/system also had a thick carpet in the floor to tame the echoes. Today Sonic might have even started by removing the carpet.

The thing is that slap echoes are a function of parallel walls but also pressure build up patterns. In a live, Tuned room, the patterns are even and orderly. When the patterns are disordered, like too much damping on one surface and too live in another place with time-related charging and discharging of pressure zones, the flutter echoes are encouraged. The more extreme the distortion of the zones, the worse the effect.

In Sonic's room, I have concrete parallel walls with no acoutic treatment and there is not a whisper of any slap echoes and this with no carpeting anywhere either.

But given my tall room (nearly 11 ft compared to the 7 to 9 ft of most other rooms here and in the US), Sonic found that to control my reverberation time, I had to treat the room in the form of layers, if any band was without some Michael Green treatment device, I got overhang in that horizontal band.

So now this is what I did:

Top band -- ceiling and down a couple of feet -- Cornertunes, echotunes (angled), ceiling shutters, home made sing pivot shutters with wood from Michael.

Upper mid band -- 3 ft down from Top Band -- two echotunes on adjacent walls, wooden window blinds

Lower mid band -- another 3 ft down -- Tunestrips, Shutters, wooden window blinds

Base level -- FS PZCs, FS-DRTs, no carpet or mat.

The object is to get the decay time even across all bands wirth none too dead or too live/ringy. It is too easy to overdamp the Base level in any room. Stacks of newspaper, furniture, bookcases -- all that stuff is at this level.

OTOH the top level of any room is usually too live simply that is where there are large untreated areas with nothing like furtniture or equipment to break up the pressure flows.

Sonic's room decay is not perfect but musick sounds even more pleasing and relaxed, and while there is less wrap around ambience, the ambience varies noticeably from recording to recording and images are filling the space between my speakers and sometimes forward too. I am also getting more complete stereo images even when standing directly in front of a loudspeaker.

Am I drawing the right conclusions and approach from these experiences, Michael?

Sonic

Sonic.beaver wrote:

Hi Michael

Sonic cannot tell from your description what Studio B was about but from the paper I posted it appears there is a lot of mental theory but not much listening behind those control room designs.

By listening, I don't mean studio engineers recording things and mixing down stuff. From my exposure to studio sound, you may be surprised that there is a lot of work but little critical musical listening going on. I have had the time to sit in a studio and listen to familar CDs and hearing the music is a different experience compared to recording a voice reading a text, hearing distortion or noises and so on. Recording work and music listening are very different.

Also our ears are adaptable, actually very adaptable. The decay time in my room has shortened a lot and over time I find Sonic is getting accustomed to the shorter decay times even though when on first listen, things could be strange.

The other thing I get from the paper is that "professional" control rooms can have wildly differing decay times in the room (between the front, sides, and rear walls). Sonic feels there is something wrong in this -- the real world musical spaces do not present us with seriously differing decay/time effects from wall to wall, point to point. Things transit smoothly, the sudden changes in studios may be the work of theoreticians who plan, build but may not listen to music and speech with one eye (ear?) on what the real thing sounds like.

And among audiophiles, there is this attachment to the word "professional", and the belief it confers something more wonderful to the music.

"Professional" is merely a set of parameters, not a guarantee of musicality. "Professional" could mean -- the speaker/amp can be thrown into the outboard studio van and still work...the balanced outputs can connect two pieces of gear 100 feet apart with no hum and intereference from mobile phone and meet certain frequency response specs never mind that a single ended, unbalanced system may sound better thru lower parts count up to 20 feet cable runs, beyond which RF noise and hum and other losses become a problem.

Domestic and Professional and Studio just mean different design objectives and trade offs. The question is "how does the music and the sense of the recording space sound?"

Sonic

People wonder why every recording sounds so different and it seems like one system sounds better with some music than others. Well this post tells a lot of the story.

"By remounting the ETs, I mean Sonic placed them across the corner like a Tunestrip rather than mounting them flat on the vertical wall as before (and recommended in early RoomTune literature). I noticed Michael did this for Bill333’s wonder-room and in my room it made a big difference to solidify the soundstage and give inner depth to the sound of instruments.

Transients are sharper and had more snap. Michael do you recommend that this becomes the standard way of mounting EchoTunes? Mounted flat on the wall, their effect is positive but subtle. 45 degrees across the wall/ceiling joint, they make a more audible difference."

For myself it totally depends how someone wants to burn the energy. Some rooms need more burn than others and differently as well. I've been in rooms that need XLTs where the EchoTunes are on a 45 and other rooms that barely need a Mini-EchoTune flat.


"Michael, you recommended me using your resitone bell cones (that is a cone hollowed out) to support my V-DAC PCB. The PCB is 6 inches long and 3.5 inches wide. How many resitone bell cones do you think I should use given the small size – 3 or 4?"

Resitone Bells are great! However, which one to use is the question. One of my next product ventures is to make a series of them based on different sizes to the bell.

Sonic.beaver wrote:

Hi Zonees

After describing my experience in trying to tame Flutterechoes to Valentin (Mediapet), here is a fuller account of what happened back then.

This was from the time Sonic was just learning the Tune but still without understanding how Michael's gear differed from conventional contoured foam panel treatments and such.

Sonic was asked to help with a slap echo problem in a hard concrete room taller and a bit larger than what I have now. It had a large glassed window on one wall (left open), an opening into a dining area on another wall and there was a small alcove too.

The owner was being driven crazy by a slap/flutter echo at the top of the two long parallel walls about 6 ft down the 25 foot length. It was a double slap echo -- you stand between the spots and clap your hands and you got a "clap-crackkkkk", it rang. Sometimes in a different spot the "kkkk" echo came from the opposite side.
You can even hear it when speaking in the room. The music was effected too with a colouration in the upper mids/lower treble.

This audiophile had big heavy tall speakers and big amps with cables that had lots of boxes attached to them.

OK -- to work. Slap echoes arise from two hard parallel walls. Damp one side and the problem goes away (or so I thought). With some help with bamboo pointers, we determined the point of the slap echoes to some accuracy. Moved away from that point and claps were clean.

Satisfied we found the spot, up went contoured absorptive foam. CLAP! It was still there but the point of slap echo now moved to a spot beyond the foam covered area. So we put another foam piece on the opposite wall facing the spot. CLAP! The thing ran the other way! No...and its getting worse. We ended up with more foam but no matter what we did, the slap echo was still there. At best the "kkkkkk" ringing echo was gone. By now the top of the room was getting pasted with foam and the audiophile's wife appeared like she wanted to poison Sonic.

Consoling ourselves that the worse of the "kkkkk" was gone we started to pack up. I move the tall ladder to the side to pack up the tools. The ladder was open and between the two walls where the "Crack" was worst, closer to one wall. Absentmindedly, Sonic clapped. And....CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! not one bit of flutter echo.

Move the ladder out of the room. Clap!Crack! Ladder back, and CLAP!

When we closed the windows, the "crack" was lessened dramatically. At the time, this made no sense to Sonic. Shouldn't a closed room cause more echo problems than an open one?

Not so as I understand it now. A closed room is simpler to deal with than one with lots of arches and openings because pressure zones leak away or move in odd patterns. The owner of that hourse/system also had a thick carpet in the floor to tame the echoes. Today Sonic might have even started by removing the carpet.

The thing is that slap echoes are a function of parallel walls but also pressure build up patterns. In a live, Tuned room, the patterns are even and orderly. When the patterns are disordered, like too much damping on one surface and too live in another place with time-related charging and discharging of pressure zones, the flutter echoes are encouraged. The more extreme the distortion of the zones, the worse the effect.

In Sonic's room, I have concrete parallel walls with no acoutic treatment and there is not a whisper of any slap echoes and this with no carpeting anywhere either.

But given my tall room (nearly 11 ft compared to the 7 to 9 ft of most other rooms here and in the US), Sonic found that to control my reverberation time, I had to treat the room in the form of layers, if any band was without some Michael Green treatment device, I got overhang in that horizontal band.

So now this is what I did:

Top band -- ceiling and down a couple of feet -- Cornertunes, echotunes (angled), ceiling shutters, home made sing pivot shutters with wood from Michael.

Upper mid band -- 3 ft down from Top Band -- two echotunes on adjacent walls, wooden window blinds

Lower mid band -- another 3 ft down -- Tunestrips, Shutters, wooden window blinds

Base level -- FS PZCs, FS-DRTs, no carpet or mat.

The object is to get the decay time even across all bands wirth none too dead or too live/ringy. It is too easy to overdamp the Base level in any room. Stacks of newspaper, furniture, bookcases -- all that stuff is at this level.

OTOH the top level of any room is usually too live simply that is where there are large untreated areas with nothing like furtniture or equipment to break up the pressure flows.

Sonic's room decay is not perfect but musick sounds even more pleasing and relaxed, and while there is less wrap around ambience, the ambience varies noticeably from recording to recording and images are filling the space between my speakers and sometimes forward too. I am also getting more complete stereo images even when standing directly in front of a loudspeaker.

Am I drawing the right conclusions and approach from these experiences, Michael?

Sonic

The main thing when describing your room is the 11' factor. 3 extra feet over the normal size room is an amazing difference. For myself, I enjoy reading your adventures and conclusions, but keep in mind that the amount of ear to ceiling air pressure is far different from what most experience. For one thing the attack time in your room as compared to others is completely different. When one considers furniture in the room as being a certain height, in your room you have an extra (as you call it) layer to think about about. I like the idea that we can all use the same method even though our paths are unique. Let me put it this way. In another post you said the word "standard". I use this word for sales purposes and basic guides, but in reality when I see someone become the master of their own space as you have, I spend more time following your cues and make mental notes. When I see you head in a particular direction I follow along your excellent descriptions (reminds me of Jim Bookhard) and picture myself listening to a plus or minus value of where you are at. After you are done learning about that particular chapter of your room you keep some of it and return to a common spot for you. I look for that common spot (a place that involves all 3 parts of the trilogy) and take this as my listening level for you. I watch the bar being raised as you learn and move forward, and take the info you give based on that, more than I do where you are at, at the moment. Reason being, the 3 parts are really one using the same energy. As one opens or closes the others are soon to follow and add their 2 sense to the equation. It's all about the flow of the atom and fair exchange.

Hi Michael

Tell me -- what are the main differences (good or bad) that my 11' room gives compared to an 8 foot normal size room?

You also said that the "amount of ear to ceiling air pressure is far different from what most experience" and you mentioned the attack time. What are the differences?

Sonic

Hi Zonees

Some time ago Michael suggested Sonic tries taping pieces of finished Magic Wood to my walls and see what effect it has.

I did -- on my side walls -- and the effect was mixed, a more liquid sound but after settling a dark and bloated in the lower mids/upper bass. A coloured sound that was imposed on every recording I listened to.

This week Sonic had one of those "what if I tried...?" moments.

This time it was "what if I took these finished MW pieces of wood [cherry not gunmetal gray, which has not worked right for me] and mounted them on the Front and Back Walls?"

One piece went on the front wall centre under the window sill between the two FS-DRTs.

Result: a clearer voicing for centre images and a wider soundstage...curious...the MW piece is only 5 inches x 3 inches x 1/4 inch...

A day of pleasant music and I got out another two pieces of cherry finished MW 3" x 2.5" x 1/4" and mounted them with small squares of 3M double sided tape 2/3 up the rear wall about 1 ft from the corner seam.

Result: a increase in soundstage width, fullness in tone and the images are now dancing within the room and outside beyond the front wall.

Next step: another pair of cherry finished MW pieces (same size), at the halfway height on the rear wall about 1 foot from the corner.

Result: increase in warmth and size of the soundstage and images. I can hear vocalists "singing to me" the way Hiend1 put it. And there is a beauty of tone too.

After a bit of settling, I tried another pair of MW pieces (same size and finish) 1/3 from the bottom on the rear wall.

Result: this time too much, an even bigger sound but I can hear images stuck on the speakers, there more width and weight but the whole thing is sounding a bit put together.

Good in some ways but I wish I could reduce the effect a little and it would be great.

So Sonic removed the 3" x 2.5" x 0.25" MW pieces and replaced them with " x 1" x 0.25" MW squares.

Result: this is about right. Huge soundstage and it sounds real. I can relax listening to music and feel often that I can relate to how different instruments are used to paint tonal and dramatic colours. There is weight and startling transients yet the amp and all the gear is the same. I am hearing width through the Magneplanars, they are getting less in the way. And there is beauty of tone, fluidity of the music.

This is something that audiophiles can ponder -- all these changes came about with pieces of Magic Wood from Michael which when added up in area will be slightly larger than your average laptop computer. Take this as a ratio to the surface area of my room boundaries, the effect is out of proportion completely. Michael is right again but the cautionary thought is too much can muddy the sound.

Michael, your thoughts on this and on my previous question about what you said the effect of a taller than average room and the air pressure above me in such a room would be in audible terms.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

I'm glad to see you bring up the issue again of the Magic Wood squares. These have been a main stay in my listening for a long time now and I have found many ways to use them. I try to live in a world of practical so that people don't get confused, but sometimes I find myself wanting to market some of these toys as serious products. I look at other companies basing their careers on things that are far less as if they were far more and smile. Oh Mr. Green "where have you gone wrong". So many toys, so little time. All the toys in the audiophile world make a difference, however do all of them make an improvement? Is the audiophile world just shifting sound around? I'm afraid in most cases yes. To know and understand what makes something work we must be experts at the big picture and not just the small niches. Our audiophile community looks at making fix-its for the broken that we/they have created instead of getting nature to work in our favor right from the start. I've seen people fall in and out of favor with magic wood and always enjoy them coming around to an understanding of it. How can these small pieces make such a big difference? Full range! As much as I appreciate products that have a selective range, it's the full range products that drive home the sound once we learn how to use them.

This all gets back to "vibratory code" and how our system/room's energy functions. I look at a system/room the same way I look at atoms and molecules. In movement and energy there is always an exchange taking place. You have the fundamental (nucleus) and all of the exchanging trans (electrons, translate, or transfers) when put in-tune harmonically creates a balanced interaction between all the audio trilogy parts, making the image real (duplicated).

If you guys saw me here at my place you would see me listening to and for a full range connection with the parts and pieces I use and am voicing. I'm like this temperamental kid when it comes to humidity and timing. These are key to voicing along with understanding materials and how they react to touch, friction, settling, shape, weight, mass and structure. To me the small pieces changing sound in a big way makes perfect sense.

Here's an example: take a glass of water and add a small amount of food coloring to it. See how the entire glass full changed? That's what you guys are doing to your systems. When you open a system up to the point where it becomes as clear as the glass of water you can make huge changes with the tools of the tune. Audio Alloy brass, Magic Wood, music ply and other materials make fantastic audio reproducer and can help other materials to sound more real by inter-mingling with waves on the way in and on the way out of transfers. When we get this in our thinking we give birth to creating reality. Think of it. How can you change the performance of a signal or wave (same thing) with something so little? It's where you use it, and how you use it!

Room Height

As you guys know I am more of a pressure man than a wave length man when it comes to smaller rooms (meaning the size of a listening room). One of the greatest teaching tools for me was when I built wood planks 35 years ago and used them to close in space and open up space. This eventually led to my development of many products and their sizes. It also taught me a lot about ceiling height and the effects on sound. Our rooms have length and width, but some times we over look height. Not so much from height of the room itself but from the perspective of the listening chair. Where your ears are at in the room means everything. We don't have a remote microphone setup that sends the signal of anyplace in the room to our ears. What we have are 2 microphones stuck to our heads and connected directly to our brain. I get a kick sometimes at how engineers get so fascinated about how things measure when they have ears directly attached to that thing they think with and will choose the measurement over what they hear. "a whole other topic" While writing this I did the simplest of test. Right where I am at I tilted my head up and down and listened to how different the fan sounded that is keeping me cool. Just in this simple movement of tilting I could hear more changes than I could possible describe except to say it sounded like I was opening and closing the shutter on a camera. Then I listened to changes while I breathed in and out. Again hard to describe but very real. It's all about us and pressure.

In my listening chairs I sit any where from 34" to 45" off of the floor (lets call it 3.5'). If I was in a 7' tall room this would put me right in the center plain of the music (a pretty cool place to be). The center plain of the music means that I can develop a true equal opportunity of sound pressure in the room top to bottom. Unfortunately I have to deal with my body, and system parts burning energy I would like to be listening to, but close enough to give me a feel for equal space. If you want to learn more about this feeling put yourself at the center height in your room and listen to how much different the sound is. This height in you room tells you everything you need to know about nodes and anti-nodes, does your room produce more standing waves or more support waves, and the general tonal shape of your room. Some of you at this height will hear a build up of sound and others a lack of build up, probably even suck out. For the listener build up is always better. Why? Because it is a lot easier to subtract the extra than to not know if your are getting everything. Note: softer drywall or wood rooms lean toward build up, and harder walls lean toward suck out or missing info. This is why you hear people complain about boom and others think their room is flat. In reality most people listening in rooms that they believe are flat are actually missing many frequencies, lost in nodes and standing waves.

quick review

A node is a point along a standing wave where the wave has minimal amplitude. The opposite of a node is an anti-node, a point where the amplitude of the standing wave is a maximum. These occur midway between the nodes.

I think it's important before we dive into the 11' ceiling that we see where there is such a big difference between the types of walls, and where our ears are, in comparisons. So if 7' offers equality in halves where does the 11' ceiling come in? If 3.5' is ear height 7' is half and 10.5' is thirds. From my own listening I have found that anywhere from 7.5-8.5 is somewhere in a predictable range as far as zoning with full range walls. Above 8.5' is where things start to become more interesting. There's a whole other space added to the picture in taller rooms and many times it makes the image seem smaller than in shorter rooms. The other big thing is the punch factor in bigger rooms is far less than smaller rooms or at least a lot harder to find the punch. In rooms like sonic's many people would use big horns to move the extra air but, horns can be a pain to listen to long term if you want to let the music take on it's own sound. Now, because Sonic's room is hard it can acually become an advantage because of the nodes. Small rooms that are hard many times need more acoutical products than hard rooms that are bigger. This has to do with wave development, and I need to think how I want to write about this. The basics are the amount of energy that gets absorbed by the wall vs the formation of pressure zones in the room. Not only are they very different in different heights of rooms but also the wall make up.

Hi Michael and Zonees

Sonic has continued the experiments with the cheery cherry finished MW pieces.

My findings so far:

a. They work best in a band around the half-height of the room to about a foot higher. Too low and they give an over resonant sound which gives the impression the RT60 is significantly longer though the BOO! and Handclap! test show the decay time has not noticeably changed. If the MW pieces are too high, they make the soundstage too wide.

b. The good effect is only when they are mounted on the front and back walls. On the side walls, they sound good at first but after a day's running in the sound is too warm, slow and puffy sounding. And this is anywhere on the side walls, high, low, towards the front,centre or rear.

Michael, can you explain why the MW pieces work well on the front and rear walls but are awful on the side walls?

c. I got three MW pieces on the front wall now -- one large one centred and two 1" square pieces near the top of the Tunestrips. I can hear a lot more distinct differences between recordings -- all have musical value and interesting details but they are all more clearly heard as the musicians playing in different acoustics (some artificial) and recorded by different microphones, mixed by engineers with different tastes. Now I am hearing sections of the orchestra go through my side walls on more recordings than before.

d. Sonic will attempt larger MW pieces on the front wall and see what happens.

On the points raised by Michael:

a. True that the soundstage appears larger in a small room than in a big one. But this could be a function of many things. I get this effect even in my untuned "vintage" type systems in other rooms (smaller and lower ceilings) in Sonic's dwelling. I also think that looking at a 10ft x 7ft front walls with speakers close in will give a different impression of soundstage width from a 15 ft x 11 ft front wall with the speakers 12 ft from it. The low ceiling within the visual field also gives a different ear/eye effect and affects the perceived soundstage.

b. Sonic stood up where my listening chair is so my ears are at the 5.5 ft half height of the my room. Again Michael scores! I get an even wider soundstage but everything is thin and a bit washed out. The images are sharper but they are separated from each other, less of a musical whole. Nothing is missing, in fact some details are increased but it is only when I sit lower down, with my ears at about 3+ ft that the sound becomes rich and real. At the higher listening point, the images feel I am looking down on the singers and instruments.

Michael, your views?

Sonic

Hi Michael and Zonees

Michael: I need to increase the strength of the centre/middle pressure zone in the fronto of my room. Though Sonic is now hearing a soundstage that has moved beyond the artifical U shape, I am lacking the continousness of imaging across the soundstage.

For instance, the sound of a hurdy gurdy is complex. If it is recorded on the right side, there is a buzz of the resonator strings across the front of the speaker plane but in the middle, parts of the Buzz is weaker.

What can I do?

And dear Zonees: my attempts to tailor the sound with MW on the walls shows that we need to work steadily and not rush -- that is to pile on more of a tune if we think it works. Sonic put pieces of MW up on the wall and started adding more when things worked. Not I may have gone one tune too far and my sound is rolled off in the treble and fat in the mid bass.

After reducing the number of the MW pieces I got on the wall and retuning my rack, something is still not right.

The Tune so often goes out and lead Tunees/Zonees into having to recheck everything in the system from end to end. Something in the sound of my set up is not exactly right...

Sonic

Hi Michael and Zonees

A very busy week at work and I was hoping each day to get back to some good musick to unwind but somewhere the sound started going off (about 4 days back). The main effect was a kind of dullness in the treble and a lack of shimmer.

This got stressful and tried reversing the last set of tunes in my records but after a while realised I was getting into a mess. So Sonic mapped a re-tuning path. This may not be the only or best approach but it seems that every Tunee will hit a bad patch and we must learn to tune our way out of it and hopefully get onto a higher plane next time around.

I took down the last few pieces of MW on the walls and put them back gradually – no good.

Then I looked at the setting of my racks one by one. The Main Rack had one rod leaning slightly but the shelves and the rods were not in contact. Sonic set the leaning rod upright and moved on. Whatever the effect of the very sightly leaning rod, this was not the casue.

Next, i checked the tightness of all cables and binding posts. All OK.

Ended up with the same amount of MW on the rear and front wall.

Then I adjusted the miniclamp for the X-30 and found the assmbly leaning slightly and also noticed that the single soft, hand wound Harmonic Spring under the front of the X-30 chassis had compressed so the top tune MW bar and the chassis was tipped forward. After adjustment so the X-30 is level and the miniclamp rack upright, things started to sound right.

Soon, the system sounded it was back on track.

But with every re-tune we learn a bit more on how we can take our systems further. The wholeness of the soundstage and the resotred treble was now sounding really good again. Then Sonic asked “what can I do to make this sound even more real?”

After some hours of listening to J Sebastian Bach’s violin concertos (Kuijken and La Petit Bande/Harmonia Mundi) and Antoine Forqueray’s pieces for viol and harpsichord (Harmonia Mundi), some John Renbourn and Miles Davis, Sonic got this idea of where to go next:

I read some of my Sound Practices magazines which I always look to for inspiration. In Issue 16, Dorwin Ggregory commented on an amp (pg 39) saying….”years of listening to OTL amplifiers have made me accustomed to an extremely wide, wall to wall, rock solid soundstage extending between the speakers and receding layer by layer behind them into the far distance. Instruments and musicians have precise spatial locations and appear as sonic holograms…..the Multivalve MV45 not only is a master of spatial depth, but it projects the sound forwards, out into the room in front of the speakers filling up the space between the listener and the transducers. The soundstage is almost spherical…”

Yes, that is what Sonic is missing! Spherical! Yes, just like Pressure Zones...

Gregory continues, “there is something more correct and true to life about this kind of presentation than the cold and ridged, objective formality of the classical soundstage. This kind of emotional and aesthetic involvement is more like what the mind does when it experiences live music….sometimes the air just seems to fill with solidified sweetness….here listening becomes swimming…you are no longer a fixed location in space, sitting on a sofa…you become a perpetually self transcending musical liquid that ebbs and flows…not listening to the speaker or the electronics but dissolving in the music and being transported by it, healed and refreshed, nourished and restored.”

To Sonic this might be Over-The-Top prose but I get Gregory’s point. I like his point about the “objective formality of the classical soundstage.” Spherical is what I need.

After taking Michael’s advice to see what my sound is like when my ears are at the height of the room, Sonic needs to increase the strength of the front/middle Pressure Zone in my room. How do I do this?

First step – I stuck the largest piece of Michael’s plastic sheet I had in the middle of the wood blinds covering the front window.

Listening, I found that I am getting more middle-fill but a slightly narrower soundstage. This is to be expected since even a slightly recessed middle soundstage may give the illusion of a more distant and a wide soundstage.

Oops, just as I (and the system) was settling in today, a good respected audiophile friend said “you got to try my DIY 26 (or 28) AWG Teflon solid core silver cables”. I trust this listener’s ears too much and his system sounds good. So I took the first of the cables he handed me and used it as an interconnect between the Sony CD player and the V-DAC. I was surprised at the clarity and “wholeness” I heard. Let’s see how this grows on Sonic.

Michael, what ideas do you have on how I can increase the strength of my front/centre Pressure Zone?

Sonic

Hi Michael and Zonees

Sonic is working thru the system to get back the sound I lost and maybe improve upon it.

There is a case for me to strengthen the pressure zone in the middle front of my room. But the plastic sheets on the window blinds solve some problems but add a colouration that creeps in after 2 days of settling.

Michael -- what is the effect of glass windows in a room? What is the way to tune them for best music, or tune them out of the equation?

In my understanding, large glass windows or sliding doors are complex things. They are in some ways the inverse of foam room treatment. The glass reflects high frequencies back into the room and they let thru more frequencies the lower you go. So at 20 kHz they are a hard reflector but move down the frequency range they let more energy out of a room till down at 30 Hz, they let it all out thru the window/door and lose energy. If that were all it is, glass windows would be easy to treat. But they also act like tympanic resonators with different peaks and nodes determined by the thickness of the glass and the dimension of the panels. So their effect might be site specific and complicated.

Michael -- do you agree?

Sonic has started zeroing in on the cause of the dullness and I'll discuss this in the next few days once I am sure I have reached the right solution.

Sonic

Hi Zonees

The box of goodies from Michael arrived!

In it are AAB1x1 cones of Audio Alloy, tuning nuts, lots of MW pieces, Picasso digital wire, AAB1x1 bell cones, space cones, mini rods and some beautiful pieces of wood.

Sonic must resist the temptation to start putting this into my system fast over a couple of days. Sure way to get confused once the settling starts. I am sure there will be improvements all round but I won't learn the tune and how to adjust things if the whole system were bolted on at one go.

Sonic started here:

1. I removed the Original MTD cones (not Audiopoints) from the mounting rails of the Magneplanar 1.5QRs and replaced them with the AAB1x1 threaded cones abd used Tuning Nuts on top.









2.Removed the Original MGA cast iron spikes from the FS-DRTs behind the listening chair and replaced them with AAB1x1 threaded cones.

Played musick.

From the first note, I could tell that the system was sounding different from what I last heard a day or so ago. Very different.

Instruments had a body and richness I did notice before. Not the fat tubey sound that the warm and wooly tube crowd like but a realism of weight and size. The relative size of instruments started to show -- in real life a piano sounds bigger than a violin and projects into the hall very differently. I can hear at least a little of this now. It is not just a violin and a piano playing but a violin and piano projecting.

The music sounds grounded. Not any disembodied sounds but instruments played by people. Instruments that have size and weight. One thing too rare in hi fi systems is -- can you tell if the performer or instrument mixed softly in the recording is playing softly or loud? If you turned the volume on your amp down, do you still get a sense if the piano keys are hammered of touched gently? What is the volume control setting of the Gibson Les Paul even if it is mixed way down? Are the 6L6 tubes in the amp breaking up? Sonic is hearing this with the cones from Michael....

I can tell how hard the bow is drawn across the strings and in one piece (a Harmonia Mundi recording of Hungarian baroque pieces). I could hear the pluck of the violin originate at the Right speaker and project past me to the rear of the room. Background choruses in classical or rock music now no longer "background vocals" but people singing words, tunes in the background.

A few hours of settling and Sonic heard a violin pluck go past my head just like live and I can hear into recordings. An acoustic guitar CD showed how the producer added bass boost to give the solo instrument some weight. I could hear a gentle bass boost has been added to push up the low E and A strings. Before this it just sounded imbalanced.

Should other Zonees buy Michael's AAB1x1 cones? YES! This was some of Sonic's best spent $ vs performance for a long time.

The price is right and the quality is very good. The cones had threads that were well cut, no burrs. They threaded cleanly into the mountings in y gear, the tips were sharp. The production quality is miles better from the old the MTDs and in another dimension from the Audiopoints.

So Michael and MGA have done it again. A reasonably priced game-changing deivce for the world of audio.

Next up -- the Digital Cable, the bell cones or the Space cones....let's see.

I need Michael's thoughts on what to do with the large piece of figure wood he sent --so beautiful it would look good as the top of a Martin guitar. The Space Cones can go on a lot of things....must go slow.

Michael -- your views?

Sonic

Hi Michael

With the pack of Tune goodies in hand and the wonderful AAB1x1 audio alloy cones installed along with the new Magic Wood squares settling in, Sonic is readying for the next step.

Some questions:

1. Space Cones – can you elaborate which 3M tape you referred to in the mounting instruction on the Products section of the website? Double-sided 3M tape is available with a 1mm foam backing and in a thin transparent variety – which should a Tunee use to mount Space Cones?

2. If Space Cones were to be mounted on walls or ceilings, where are the places they should go for best effect (or as a starting point)?

3. I noticed that if I have a large glass picture window, you recommend that the Space Cones should be mounted one at each corner. What about windows with narrow panes and hinged – like an 8 ft window with 4 panes of 2 ft wide glass? If I used the one Space Cones per corner approach that will mean 16 Space Cones on the windows. A bit much. What do you recommend for narrow window panes -- one at the top and one at the bottom?

4. From the Space Cones advert, they can be used point up under bookcases and cupboards in the listening room. Even table lamps. Is this correct?

5. What are other ways to use the Space Cones in a room and set up like mine?

6. Can you draw me a simple pix of how I can build a support for my V-DAC circuit board using the beautiful poplar slice. Should I use the mini rods you supply and drill holes in each corner and make a small platform? If I drill the wood, the holes should be larger than the diameter of the rod so it doesn’t touch the Poplar shelf but the nuts hold it together. Like the clamp rack rods and nuts.

7. Does the V-DAC circuit board just sit on the Poplar? The bottom surface is uneven with the soldered cables from the chips and capacitors and such sticking out.Is this OK or is a way to support the circuit board? Remember the board is crowded so there very little flat surface for plastic cones, maybe tiny ones just at the corners.

8. You’ve sent me bell cones – actually 3 cones, one solid, one with a shallow bell and one a deep bell. I guess they can work together under one component. Which component will give the biggest change – something earlier in the audio chain like a turntable or later like a power amp?

About my sound: the cones have settled even more and the whole sound has become more detached and disconnected from the loudspeakers as sources. The richness is dizzying.

I've also got a lot to tell about the Picasso wire now being used as a digital cable linking the transport to the V-DAC

Sonic

Hi Michael and Zonees

Sonic connected the Sony CD player/transport to the V-DAC with a length of Picasso from Michael. After a number of hours of running in, the impression I got is (compared to a spare 3 ft piece of T1 Bare Essence terminated with light gold plated RCA plugs) the new cable gave a slightly brighter and liveliers sound with a more extended treble. Much more detail in the range of cymbals and bells from what I am gradually noticing. Lower down in pitch, violins had more bite and I could tell the miking used -- if it was miked close, things could get edgy even with gut strung violins and chest of viols.

Good but not that much better than the Bare Essence. This also showed me that we get very good music even if the digital cable is not the text book 75.01 ohms.

Given that the Picasso has someway to go before it is fully settled, I shouldn't get too definite in my views. But certainly it is an improvement over the Bare Essence -- but not a large step up (yet).

Sonic

Sonic.beaver wrote:

Hi Michael and Zonees

A very busy week at work and I was hoping each day to get back to some good musick to unwind but somewhere the sound started going off (about 4 days back). The main effect was a kind of dullness in the treble and a lack of shimmer.

This got stressful and tried reversing the last set of tunes in my records but after a while realised I was getting into a mess. So Sonic mapped a re-tuning path. This may not be the only or best approach but it seems that every Tunee will hit a bad patch and we must learn to tune our way out of it and hopefully get onto a higher plane next time around.

I took down the last few pieces of MW on the walls and put them back gradually – no good.

Then I looked at the setting of my racks one by one. The Main Rack had one rod leaning slightly but the shelves and the rods were not in contact. Sonic set the leaning rod upright and moved on. Whatever the effect of the very sightly leaning rod, this was not the casue.

Next, i checked the tightness of all cables and binding posts. All OK.

Ended up with the same amount of MW on the rear and front wall.

Then I adjusted the miniclamp for the X-30 and found the assmbly leaning slightly and also noticed that the single soft, hand wound Harmonic Spring under the front of the X-30 chassis had compressed so the top tune MW bar and the chassis was tipped forward. After adjustment so the X-30 is level and the miniclamp rack upright, things started to sound right.

Soon, the system sounded it was back on track.

But with every re-tune we learn a bit more on how we can take our systems further. The wholeness of the soundstage and the resotred treble was now sounding really good again. Then Sonic asked “what can I do to make this sound even more real?”

After some hours of listening to J Sebastian Bach’s violin concertos (Kuijken and La Petit Bande/Harmonia Mundi) and Antoine Forqueray’s pieces for viol and harpsichord (Harmonia Mundi), some John Renbourn and Miles Davis, Sonic got this idea of where to go next:

I read some of my Sound Practices magazines which I always look to for inspiration. In Issue 16, Dorwin Ggregory commented on an amp (pg 39) saying….”years of listening to OTL amplifiers have made me accustomed to an extremely wide, wall to wall, rock solid soundstage extending between the speakers and receding layer by layer behind them into the far distance. Instruments and musicians have precise spatial locations and appear as sonic holograms…..the Multivalve MV45 not only is a master of spatial depth, but it projects the sound forwards, out into the room in front of the speakers filling up the space between the listener and the transducers. The soundstage is almost spherical…”

Yes, that is what Sonic is missing! Spherical! Yes, just like Pressure Zones...

Gregory continues, “there is something more correct and true to life about this kind of presentation than the cold and ridged, objective formality of the classical soundstage. This kind of emotional and aesthetic involvement is more like what the mind does when it experiences live music….sometimes the air just seems to fill with solidified sweetness….here listening becomes swimming…you are no longer a fixed location in space, sitting on a sofa…you become a perpetually self transcending musical liquid that ebbs and flows…not listening to the speaker or the electronics but dissolving in the music and being transported by it, healed and refreshed, nourished and restored.”

To Sonic this might be Over-The-Top prose but I get Gregory’s point. I like his point about the “objective formality of the classical soundstage.” Spherical is what I need.

After taking Michael’s advice to see what my sound is like when my ears are at the height of the room, Sonic needs to increase the strength of the front/middle Pressure Zone in my room. How do I do this?

First step – I stuck the largest piece of Michael’s plastic sheet I had in the middle of the wood blinds covering the front window.

Listening, I found that I am getting more middle-fill but a slightly narrower soundstage. This is to be expected since even a slightly recessed middle soundstage may give the illusion of a more distant and a wide soundstage.

Oops, just as I (and the system) was settling in today, a good respected audiophile friend said “you got to try my DIY 26 (or 28) AWG Teflon solid core silver cables”. I trust this listener’s ears too much and his system sounds good. So I took the first of the cables he handed me and used it as an interconnect between the Sony CD player and the V-DAC. I was surprised at the clarity and “wholeness” I heard. Let’s see how this grows on Sonic.

Michael, what ideas do you have on how I can increase the strength of my front/centre Pressure Zone?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

I would really like to hear what it sounds like after you freshly baked the Magic Wood and put it back in the same places.

Sonic.beaver wrote:

Hi Zonees

The box of goodies from Michael arrived!

In it are AAB1x1 cones of Audio Alloy, tuning nuts, lots of MW pieces, Picasso digital wire, AAB1x1 bell cones, space cones, mini rods and some beautiful pieces of wood.

Sonic must resist the temptation to start putting this into my system fast over a couple of days. Sure way to get confused once the settling starts. I am sure there will be improvements all round but I won't learn the tune and how to adjust things if the whole system were bolted on at one go.

Sonic started here:

1. I removed the Original MTD cones (not Audiopoints) from the mounting rails of the Magneplanar 1.5QRs and replaced them with the AAB1x1 threaded cones abd used Tuning Nuts on top.









2.Removed the Original MGA cast iron spikes from the FS-DRTs behind the listening chair and replaced them with AAB1x1 threaded cones.

Played musick.

From the first note, I could tell that the system was sounding different from what I last heard a day or so ago. Very different.

Instruments had a body and richness I did notice before. Not the fat tubey sound that the warm and wooly tube crowd like but a realism of weight and size. The relative size of instruments started to show -- in real life a piano sounds bigger than a violin and projects into the hall very differently. I can hear at least a little of this now. It is not just a violin and a piano playing but a violin and piano projecting.

The music sounds grounded. Not any disembodied sounds but instruments played by people. Instruments that have size and weight. One thing too rare in hi fi systems is -- can you tell if the performer or instrument mixed softly in the recording is playing softly or loud? If you turned the volume on your amp down, do you still get a sense if the piano keys are hammered of touched gently? What is the volume control setting of the Gibson Les Paul even if it is mixed way down? Are the 6L6 tubes in the amp breaking up? Sonic is hearing this with the cones from Michael....

I can tell how hard the bow is drawn across the strings and in one piece (a Harmonia Mundi recording of Hungarian baroque pieces). I could hear the pluck of the violin originate at the Right speaker and project past me to the rear of the room. Background choruses in classical or rock music now no longer "background vocals" but people singing words, tunes in the background.

A few hours of settling and Sonic heard a violin pluck go past my head just like live and I can hear into recordings. An acoustic guitar CD showed how the producer added bass boost to give the solo instrument some weight. I could hear a gentle bass boost has been added to push up the low E and A strings. Before this it just sounded imbalanced.

Should other Zonees buy Michael's AAB1x1 cones? YES! This was some of Sonic's best spent $ vs performance for a long time.

The price is right and the quality is very good. The cones had threads that were well cut, no burrs. They threaded cleanly into the mountings in y gear, the tips were sharp. The production quality is miles better from the old the MTDs and in another dimension from the Audiopoints.

So Michael and MGA have done it again. A reasonably priced game-changing deivce for the world of audio.

Next up -- the Digital Cable, the bell cones or the Space cones....let's see.

I need Michael's thoughts on what to do with the large piece of figure wood he sent --so beautiful it would look good as the top of a Martin guitar. The Space Cones can go on a lot of things....must go slow.

Michael -- your views?

Sonic

I'm also very interested to hear your sound as the Magic Wood settles. I've had myself immersed in voicing lately and because the weather has been perfect for outdoor curing I'm liking what I'm getting. Also the "instrument finish" looking wood and the Space Cones do some very nice things.

Hi Michael and Zonees

As the MW and the AAB1x1 cones settle, I am getting more dynamic range and a sense of the spherical soundstage. The thing I am noticing most is how the sound varies from recording to recording -- this should be obvious due to the different studios, performer technigue, mikes, monitor speakers and production people involved. Maybe systems cloud the difference? I can tell details like the sort of monitoring used in recordings done in the 60s and 70s, how there was a broad British sound over this period, how mikes are used to spotlight instruments in the orchestra and where even edits are done. Sonic can tell how loud the mix down was done and for one recording he remarked "this one was mixed down on Tannoys"...OK don't know how true that is but the recording had this particular sound that reminded me of the sound of the venerable British speaker. I hear more of this now but without the detail getting into the way of enjoying the musick.

Bass as gotten tighter without loss of extension, I need to change some subwoofer crossover settings and level.

The AAB1x1 cones and MW are

Sonic found that the MW squares when used under the speakers and FS-DRTs stuck to the floor after a week. My humidity fluctuated but my room has dehumidification a lot of the time.
Is this a new feature to couple the vibrations better to ground?

Removing them is easy but I won't be doing any baking of the MW. Two reasons: my use of the baking facility I have acess to for wood is not permitted now. And the quality of the musick that Michael's products have got my system to has made me reluctant to go thru these time consuming things which involve taking things down and putting the system out of action. The music is so good the incentive and possibility of a Big Change needs to be there.

Now the Picasso as a digital cable.

More extended treble and clearer highs. It of course adds to the effect of the AAB1x1 comes and MW and is a Tuning success. I was expecting more though, and this might well come as settling goes on. Right now, it is good but not great (yet)

I drilled the poplar wood and made a platform using MGA 1/4" spikes and MGA brass tuning nuts. This will go under the V-DAC with the assembly sitting on top my my Clamprack.

Let's see what this does.....

Michael -- in the pack you sent me, there were 3 pieces of something that felt like fibre squares 1.5" x 1.5" x 0.2". They are coated brown on the surface but are of some black fibre material inside. What are they? What can I use them for?

I'll use MW under the V-DAC PCB and the poplar platform because it is likely the board won't sit properly on the poplar platform. Why won't the V-DAC PCB sit properly? That's because the poplar shelf is not completely flat, has very slight curvature. Also the components on the V-DAC board are through-soldered which means the wires stick out on the bottom surface of the PCB slightly. The wire ends are not all of the same length so the PCB can rock when you push down on a corner.

Then there are all the Space Cones -- Michael, more guidance on how to use them to tune wood doors (particularly doube doors like mine) and glass windows with multiple narrow panes.

Space Cones under the feet of tables, bookcases even lamps is straightforwad.

If Space Cones are to be used to tune walls, where do they go? Can they improve hard concrete walls?

Sonic

Hi Zonees

Sonic just made a big step forward in sound realism -- here's how:

Michael sent me three Audio Alloy cones to be used under my equipment in my last box o' goodies -- a solid AAB1x1 cone, a AAB1x1 SBS cones, that's one with a deep hollowed out bell and an AAB 1x1 SB cone, the one with a shallow hollowed out bell.

I placed them under my Sony CD player using a set up Michael recommended in his products page for cones (have a careful read on how Michael teaches how to use his cones under various pieces of sound quipment). I set the CD player on three cones, one in front and two at the rear corners of the chassis.









The SBS deep bell cone went to the Left Rear under the power supply (with its mini transformer, switching noise and all that), the shallow bell SB cones went to the Right Rear under the deigital circuitry and the solid cone went to the front under the display.

The effect of the Audio Alloy cones is eye popping

First thing -- the sound has more girth and instruments have better texture

Second thing -- the treble is clearer, I can hear more detail but not from a ringy or lifted upper range

Third thing -- the whole system sounds like a background noise has been removed or significantly reduced in level when playing CDs

Fourth thing -- the sound is louder for any given setting but it appears to improved dynamics as a SLM will read the same sound level in dBs

Fifth thing -- voices and instruments have a new found feeling of naturalness and ease

But notice that the CD player is NOT TOP TUNED! It just sits on the cones.

Maybe the difference is partly coming from the top shelf of my rack carrying the V-DAC PCB no longer getting vibrational interference from also acting as a top tune shelf.

Sonic never thought that any non-top tuned device can sound this good. The difference is very noticeable. Again I have to say that the Audio Alloy cones work magic for the musick.

Sonic

Hi Zonees

With the Sony CD player better tuned using Audio Alloy cones, Sonic has had days of very good music, so good in fact that there is less incentive to jump up and tune anything now. The nice thing is I can hear and follow inner voices in a recording like the viola line or different voices within a choir. I'll going to order a few more sets of AAB1x1 SBS cones and some SB cones and start using them under my gear and make top tuning optional. Top tuning works but it can make put system too mechanically on edge.

Listening today, I can gradually hear my system tell me things like where the tuning/grounding flow need freeing up and where there are constrictions and bottlenecks. Of course Sonic is not able to say like Michael does after a few moments of listening "the CD player has too much mass"...."the second shelf is out of level"....this is Michael's gift, not mine....but I can hear that wall zone adjacent to the Magneplanar 1.5QRs needs work, the transformers and the racks need a relook.

I'll start working on this over the weekend. And when Michael gets back online and answers my questions about the Space Cones, I'll have a lot more musick on the way.

Sonic

Hi Sonic

Greetings from the land of saw dust. The great weather here has kept me close to my sand paper. I get up at 5am to hit my first sanding at 6. From there I follow the suns movement through the day, placing the wood strategically around my outside around like a big oven slow or quick cooking the different pieces that get flipped during the day. Natural curing is becoming an obsession for me I'm afraid.

You said the new Magic Wood pieces stuck to the floor? It's fascinating to me how long it takes for finishes to truly evaporate. People say how slow I am when tweaking but there is no way to rush great curing. If you don't have access to an oven any more I might recommend a wire element space heater. These with a good de-humidifier will do wonders used together.

When the MW pieces do start to cure more you are going to be very please with their delivery of sound.

The brown pieces are Resitone and can be directly placed under electronic parts without shorting anything out. The discoloring in the center is actually the wood pulp and Rez mix. This is where I make things thin or thick, more absorbent or less absorbent. I wanted to give you a taste for the material. Even the little you have will make huge changes in the sound as the pieces are pure dielectric in nature. Place them near any fields as partitions, transfers or tents and you will hear the fields react. This is one of the next levels of extreme tuning I would like to train the industry in if they ever catch up. I treat fields much as I do Pressure zones controlling their spaces, shapes and sizes.

Your Spaces Cones. Think of Space Cones as balanced antennas. They are not only transfer devices of mechanical energy be also sending and receiving beacons for electrons. They are conductors for creating or changing energy patterns. I usually use them with some type of dielectric when placing them on objects or sticking them to walls or windows. The question you ask is where? This can be answered on tweaky terms or basic levels. For myself I start with simple uses to see how the energy reacts to the Cone. For the sake of moving things around Blu-tack can be used but when you find the spot you wish to tune I recommend 3M double sided (thin) tape. The SC works well with MW, Resitone poplar (among other wood) as well as (surprising) Velcro as the dielectric.

When I start my placement of these units I go to the middle of any surface or object and listen to the energy being pulled to it. Then I start a balancing act between the edge or corner of the surface and the center to come up with my pattern. Sometimes it is better to go corners only leaving the centers untouched but with most surfaces there is a weird phasing problem that gets corrected when going center out.

Keep in mind that a plaster wall reacts different than a stud wall, and on a stud wall the stud itself may effect the performance making it necessary to go on either side of a stud or directly on the stud. It all depends on how the energy is flowing in your room.

More than likely I will come out with dielectric disc to use with the Space Cones.

Hi Sonic

In your shipment I believe I also sent you wire and RCA ends. I am currently cooking Bare Essence and Picasso from 18gauge down to 32gauge. As I know you are playing with silver content wire at a lower gauge you might want to try some of the different gauges I'm doing.

Conductivity
Electrical conductivity is the measure of how well electric current flows through a material. It's measured in units of siemens per meter.

Copper Conductivity
The conductivity of annealed copper is 59 x 10^6 siemens/meter. The resistance of a 24-gauge copper wire 1,000 feet long at room temperature will be about 26 ohms.

Silver Conductivity
The conductivity of silver is about 7 percent higher than for copper, or 63 x 10^6 siemens/meter. A silver 24-gauge, 1,000-foot-long wire would measure about 24 ohms.

Will I ever make Bare Essence or Picasso out of silver? I don't know. Reason being is an upper end shift in the frequencies with silver. Is this the fault of the silver? I have found that all metals that make this shift are oxygen starved instead of oxygen friendly.

Sonic.beaver wrote:

Hi Zonees

After describing my experience in trying to tame Flutterechoes to Valentin (Mediapet), here is a fuller account of what happened back then.

This was from the time Sonic was just learning the Tune but still without understanding how Michael's gear differed from conventional contoured foam panel treatments and such.

Sonic was asked to help with a slap echo problem in a hard concrete room taller and a bit larger than what I have now. It had a large glassed window on one wall (left open), an opening into a dining area on another wall and there was a small alcove too.

The owner was being driven crazy by a slap/flutter echo at the top of the two long parallel walls about 6 ft down the 25 foot length. It was a double slap echo -- you stand between the spots and clap your hands and you got a "clap-crackkkkk", it rang. Sometimes in a different spot the "kkkk" echo came from the opposite side.
You can even hear it when speaking in the room. The music was effected too with a colouration in the upper mids/lower treble.

This audiophile had big heavy tall speakers and big amps with cables that had lots of boxes attached to them.

OK -- to work. Slap echoes arise from two hard parallel walls. Damp one side and the problem goes away (or so I thought). With some help with bamboo pointers, we determined the point of the slap echoes to some accuracy. Moved away from that point and claps were clean.

Satisfied we found the spot, up went contoured absorptive foam. CLAP! It was still there but the point of slap echo now moved to a spot beyond the foam covered area. So we put another foam piece on the opposite wall facing the spot. CLAP! The thing ran the other way! No...and its getting worse. We ended up with more foam but no matter what we did, the slap echo was still there. At best the "kkkkkk" ringing echo was gone. By now the top of the room was getting pasted with foam and the audiophile's wife appeared like she wanted to poison Sonic.

Consoling ourselves that the worse of the "kkkkk" was gone we started to pack up. I move the tall ladder to the side to pack up the tools. The ladder was open and between the two walls where the "Crack" was worst, closer to one wall. Absentmindedly, Sonic clapped. And....CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! not one bit of flutter echo.

Move the ladder out of the room. Clap!Crack! Ladder back, and CLAP!

When we closed the windows, the "crack" was lessened dramatically. At the time, this made no sense to Sonic. Shouldn't a closed room cause more echo problems than an open one?

Not so as I understand it now. A closed room is simpler to deal with than one with lots of arches and openings because pressure zones leak away or move in odd patterns. The owner of that hourse/system also had a thick carpet in the floor to tame the echoes. Today Sonic might have even started by removing the carpet.

The thing is that slap echoes are a function of parallel walls but also pressure build up patterns. In a live, Tuned room, the patterns are even and orderly. When the patterns are disordered, like too much damping on one surface and too live in another place with time-related charging and discharging of pressure zones, the flutter echoes are encouraged. The more extreme the distortion of the zones, the worse the effect.

In Sonic's room, I have concrete parallel walls with no acoutic treatment and there is not a whisper of any slap echoes and this with no carpeting anywhere either.

But given my tall room (nearly 11 ft compared to the 7 to 9 ft of most other rooms here and in the US), Sonic found that to control my reverberation time, I had to treat the room in the form of layers, if any band was without some Michael Green treatment device, I got overhang in that horizontal band.

So now this is what I did:

Top band -- ceiling and down a couple of feet -- Cornertunes, echotunes (angled), ceiling shutters, home made sing pivot shutters with wood from Michael.

Upper mid band -- 3 ft down from Top Band -- two echotunes on adjacent walls, wooden window blinds

Lower mid band -- another 3 ft down -- Tunestrips, Shutters, wooden window blinds

Base level -- FS PZCs, FS-DRTs, no carpet or mat.

The object is to get the decay time even across all bands wirth none too dead or too live/ringy. It is too easy to overdamp the Base level in any room. Stacks of newspaper, furniture, bookcases -- all that stuff is at this level.

OTOH the top level of any room is usually too live simply that is where there are large untreated areas with nothing like furtniture or equipment to break up the pressure flows.

Sonic's room decay is not perfect but musick sounds even more pleasing and relaxed, and while there is less wrap around ambience, the ambience varies noticeably from recording to recording and images are filling the space between my speakers and sometimes forward too. I am also getting more complete stereo images even when standing directly in front of a loudspeaker.

Am I drawing the right conclusions and approach from these experiences, Michael?

Sonic

This is a beautiful post, a work of art. Hopefully your friend has learned a little more about burning energy and preserving the music signal.

I am a huge fan of waves, zones and fields. They have won my respect as sources of the big picture. Shaping them is an art that should not be treated with direct absorption but more controlled selective burning and shaping.

Hi Michael and Zonees

Sonic got the feeling that something more needed to be done at the front wall in the zone between the corner and the FS-PZCs mounted in a V at the middle (that’s behind the racks). There is this vagueness that could do with more focus and a sense that the images were bunched. I mean if we had a row of (say for example) 10 hand bells each spaced 2 ft from each other in a straight line and recorded properly that way, the images should not bunch or curve across the front soundstage.

I don’t have such a recording but I know some have been made by acousticians to test soundstaging –Michael, what your view the validity of such a test? -- in my system, there is very little or no curvature but there is bunching. So Sonic moved two FS-DRT (special) to the front wall midway between the corner seam and the FS-PZCs, placed about a foot from the wall.

A fairly good effect. The music became more focused across the stage but the stage width and sense of beyond sidewall extension is gone. There is a lot of depth as well as decoupling of images from the speaker plane. Sonic thought if width is lacking, lets move the FS-DRTs closer to the wall corners.

A big move into the corner was no good, the curvature came back. So back to the original position and moved them an inch or a half-inch at a time. First inch started to improve things and a little more “click” the whole stage fell into focus.

I had a solid straight-line focus stage stretching across the front of my room. There was some extension outside the room too. Just like I have heard once before from a system with its dynamic speakers placed in the front corners, powered with lots of tube gear and costing a couple of automobiles.

This is great….I never heard anything like this from Magnaplanars ever. If there was a fly in the ointment, it was a small lack of forwardness. Not a big thing to Sonic except the musical performance was now happening more “there” than “here”.

More than anything this shows that you cannot just put Michael's products down and expect them to work optimally. In the wrong places their effect is Zero or Negative (that is where some of the criticism of Michael come from). You need to listen and work a bit at it. And as the room and equipment frees up, you can more easily hear hwart needs fixing. The first steps from a conventional room with all the blockages, mass and rubber and foam is the hardest to get a handle on but often the most rewarding too.

After a couple days of settling, I said “I can live with this” and considered calling it a day. It was that good. Then the Tuning urge returned – the Space Cones.

I used thin double sided tape and stuck each cone to a 1/8 thick MW square and mounted 4 on each door set in my room at the corners. Almost instantly a big increase in girth, increased emphasis on the frequency range where bowing of string instruments reside. Beethoven’s sonatas for cello and piano (Angela Hewitt on Hyperion) never sounded this projected into the room and real. The only down side was…..the projection narrowed the width….sometimes it feels like going in circles. But hopefully spiraling up.

Michael – your views? I still need your guidance on where to put the Space Cones on my side walls in the zone between the front wall and the plane of the speakers. The explanation you gave in the last reply, it ain’t clear at all….please try again. I need a starting point.

I like the idea of the 32 AWG cables from MGA. I think that is the right way to go. Sonic actually does like silver cables in my system and my experiments have been promising so far. I may just go in this direction. I'm testing this out and what I have found is the wires have to be solid core and very thin - 26AWG is the starting point and then go skinnier. Thick complex cables are nasty -- this is true of any material but IMO especially for silver.

Sonic

Hi Zonees

Here's a pix of how I attached the Space Cones to doors (the other side looks the same):









This is working and I am getting very good imaging and a stronger sense that I am in the space where the music is playing. The only thing now is the sides -- insufficient width in the zones behind the loudspeakers. The instruments are starting to go thru the walls and sound "further outside" but there is some bunching and a slight upward curvature.

How to get the violins and instruments at the edges of the soundstage far out?

Will Space Cones do the job? Where should they be mounted?

Sonic