Bill333's System

Hi Everyone,

It's been a long while since I've posted on Tuneland, and this is my first post to the Techno-Zone. I have a lot going on tune-wise, but I'm going to use this first post just to let you all know what's been happening. I moved eight months ago to a new house where I have more room for my stereo and home theatre. Well, that wasn't the only reason for the move . But I did specifically look for houses with large, unfinished basements that would allow me enough space to install rooms for both HT and stereo listening.

The home theatre is already built, and I've temporarily set up the stereo in a second floor loft. You may have noticed Michael's thread under Tuning where he mentions that he's building a tunable room for me. This is absolutely true and it's something we have been working on for the last several months. Although I haven't been active on Tuneland, I have been corresponding with Michael almost non-stop during this time.

The room is getting close to complete- nearly all the basic wood finishing has been done. What remains to do is cutting, drilling, voicing and construction. Michael and his workers will do a build of the room there in Las Vegas, and I will come down to listen to it for final voicing and tweaking before it is broken down and shipped to Chicago.

I'll post again soon with room progress and more about my current tuning efforts. It's good to be back, and I'm looking forward to sharing what's going on during this very exciting time!

Hey, that's great news. Are you daunted at all with the prospect of having an entire room to tune? I'll have my hands full just figuring out how to tune a few items. I know you're an old hand at this sort of thing, but DAMN! The possibilities are virtually endless. Are we talking floors and ceiling, also?

No, I'm not worried about having the room to tune. I spoke with Michael about this early on- he says the room's tuning should be pretty stable once it's set up. So I don't really need to tune the room unless I want to. Part of the price of the room is Michael coming out to help set up the room in my house and tuning the room and system.

The room is just that- an entire room, with walls, floors, ceiling and all the framing that holds it together. It's a stand alone structure, all it really needs is a floor to put it on and enough vertical space to cover the top of the framing. There are some pictures of one on the old Tuneland web site.

Following is the text of an email I wrote to Michael last week about my latest tuning efforts. For background, I built a pair of speakers from a kit made by Altmann Micro Machines from Germany. After breaking in, I wasn't happy with their sound and have been trying to figure out what went wrong with them ever since. The 'Quads' are the original Quad electrostatic loudspeaker (57).

Hi Michael,

I did a lot of work on my system(s) over this last weekend. I finally found out what was wrong with the Altmann speakers. The trouble was that the baffles were a little warped and I had fastened the midrange and tweeter across the non-flat surface as tight as they could go. This was stepping on the sound in a big way. I fixed it by loosening all the screws and then tightening just two out of the four on each midrange and tweeter. The woofer cabinet is flat and the woofers sounded best with all but one of their screws tightened.

After these adjustments, the sound of the speaker is greatly improved. I am much happier with them, but in a head to head comparison with the Quads, they cannot match the detail, clarity and transparency of the Quad. I was expecting them to be more dynamic than the Quads, but this really wasn't the case either. Not because they lack dynamic impact, but because my current configuration with the Quads is so exceptional in that regard.

One of the things I did was a cable comparison on each of the speakers (Bare Essence, Naim and Anti-Cables). I had been using the Naim cables between the RWA amp and the Quads, but when I put in the Bare Essence they brought the system to new levels of dynamics and clarity. I'm almost certain I tested this before about a year ago and thought the Naim cables were better, but this time the Bare Essence were the clear winners. I think the reason is that I had replaced the binding posts on both amp and speakers with Eichmann CablePods. They have an unusual way of holding bare wire which I think works really well. Something you might want to think about.

After I finished the work on the Altmann speakers I set the Quad system back up with the Bare Essence cables and a few more tweaks: I put the speaker cables up on the cable grounds, and inserted those styrofoam and paper thingies (what were they called?) under the components. This vaulted the system to a new high. It's the best sound I've ever heard in a system I own and may be the best sound I've ever heard in any system anywhere. The dynamic contrasts are explosive and the sound has a speed, delicacy and transparency which I've rarely heard. Voices seem to convey a level of emotional expressiveness that I haven't heard before. It's also completely unfatigueing, and completely musically involving. I've been listening for hours re-discovering my music collection, amazed at the incredible artists and performances.

Getting to the point of all this: I will go with whatever system sounds best in the room, whatever it might be. If it's the 60's and $50 worth of electronics from the Best Buy, so be it. What I'm saying is that the bar is set very high. So we may want to start thinking about how to make the Quads work in the room.

Best regards,

Bill

One of the things which is still up in the air is what speakers will be used in the room. At this point it will probably be either the Classic 60s or the Quads. My 60s I sent out to Michael a couple weeks ago to be dried out and refurbished. The decision probably won't be made until the room is here and I have a chance to try both.

Hi Everyone,

It's been a few days now since I got back from Las Vegas where I got to spend a few days visiting Michael and the tunable room. It was a great trip, and I learned a lot; more than I expected I would. So I'm going to categorize my report by lessons learned.

Lesson 1: Work In Progress
Michael finished construction of the room only about 24 hours before I arrived. I had expected that a system would be set up in the room and that I would sit down and hear the full impact of a tunable room. The only question I had was what I was going to do with the rest of my three day trip after I had listened to the CDs I brought in this splendid new listening room.

Well, I got in on Sunday evening and as soon as I had checked into my hotel we went over to Michael's and I saw the tunable room for the first time. The wood was beautiful, and the naked framing makes the room look like a piece of functional artwork, which it is. Michael invited me to sit down in the room and put on one of the compilations CDs I had put together for the trip. I listened for the first time, and it was awful. No soundstaging, no highs, no lows, just complete confusion in the sound field. I listened for two minutes, then stalked out to confront Michael: "This sounds terrible!". Michael replied that the room had never been tuned and that no musical instrument sounds right until it's been tuned.

It turns out that this had been Michael's plan all along: introduce me to the sound of the untuned room and then show me the entire process of tuning the room and the equipment so that I would know how to do it myself. Sort of a boot camp for tuning. I'll go into the tuning process we went through in the next sections, for now I'll just reveal that the room spent very little time sounding bad.

In addition to the tuning of room and equipment, there is also a breaking in, settling and curing process that takes place over the first few months after the room is built. At one point in the second day, I was listening to music in the room when the sound spontaneously shifted. Neither Michael nor I had done anything to the room or the equipment, but all of a sudden the sound was better. Voices and instruments had become more focused, better separated and overall more clear. I jumped up and ran out of the room to find Michael. "You've got to hear this thing!", I said. Michael just looked amused, but he went in and listened for a few minutes. When he came out he laughed and said that if I thought the sound we were getting now was good, I should just wait until the room was really tuned in-- because what we were getting now was only about 1% of what the sound would eventually be.

Lesson 2: The Sound Of Wood
One of the first things Michael did after shocking me with the sound of the untuned room was to loosen just a few screws near the front right corner and then demonstrate what that did to the sound of his voice. I could clearly hear his voice get deeper and take on a more melodious character. Next, he loosened the screws on one entire panel and showed me how the panel controlled the character of the sound hitting it by speaking continuously while walking from that panel to the untuned one next to it. It was easy to hear the shift in his voice as he passed from the tuned panel to the next one.

Next he demonstrated how you can also tell the character of the wood by tapping on it. He knocked on the loosened panel every few inches in a line from one side to the other, and then again on the untuned panel next to it. The knocks on the panel with the loosened screws were resonant and full, like knocking on hollow wood, while the unloosened panel sounded hard, flat and muffled. This is a useful technique for assessing the sound of any piece of wood, even ones that are too small to give a clear reflection of a voice. I saw Michael do this repeatedly with every piece of wood he treated for the canopies on the equipment, and I know he did the same process for every piece of wood that went into building the room. Listen to (tap on) the wood to figure out where it is, treat it, listen to it again to make sure it's going in the right direction, treat it, and repeat the process until you get the sound you're looking for.

The next day, Michael had loosened all the screws on the walls, a couple of panels on the floor and none of the panels on the ceiling. But even this partial loosening was enough to transform the sound of the room. With most of the panels loosened up enough to take on a properly resonant character, the music started to come alive.

Lesson 3: Tuning
But it wasn't just the room that was being tuned in, it was also the equipment. Michael had dried some wood in the oven overnight and then sanded and coated it in the morning. Normally, he'll do the drying, listening and sanding six times over for each piece, but he wanted to get these pieces out quickly so we could listen to them while I was there. I'll post some pictures of the rack later, but basically each component got two long, thin pieces of wood supporting it from underneath with harmonic springs. Simple canopies were constructed with a third piece of wood and pieces of threaded rod. A piece of nylon threaded rod went through the canopy to touch the component board.

At each stage of the equipment treatment I could hear the sound becoming more dialled in. At least that was usually the case. The first time we tried to set the tuning rod onto the receiver, Michael came out of the room laughing and said "Hey, you've got to hear this! Go in there and tell me where the vocalist is." We had been playing 'Whole Lotta Love' by Led Zeppelin, so we started the track over and I went in to see what was going on. The soundstage seemed kind of confused, but after a minute I got a handle on it and realised that it sounded like Robert Plant was on top of my head! We pulled that canopy off and then rearranged it so the effects were more positive the next day. But the wrong tuning move can have dire effects.

Lesson 4: Let Michael Do His Thing
Like everyone else, I have put a lot of time and effort into finding good sounding equipment; matching it, tweaking it, learning how to set it up optimally. I feel like I've done quite well with my Quad-57 based system. But hearing what Michael can do with a $28 dime store DVD player, an old receiver he got for $15 from ebay, and a pair of Classic 60's, I have really started to question what I've been doing with equipment so far. What sense does it make to spend $1000s of dollars on amplifiers, DACs and transport systems when Michael can get audio performance better than I ever dreamed of for 40 bucks? Note: the system at Michael's was not there yet when I left, but was heading in that direction, and fast.

I've always had faith in Michael, but hearing the room come into voice has really driven home that he knows how to get good sound better than I do. I could stick with my own equipment in the room, but I would really just be complicating Michael's job. Ultimate sound is ultimate sound, whatever speakers are creating it.

The one fly in the ointment is that my music is on a digital server and I cannot easily go back to spinning CDs. Besides losing the convenience of having my entire music collection at my fingertips I would lose the ability to search for songs, make backups of the entire collection and control the whole thing from my iPhone. So I don't want to go back, but Michael has no experience with network devices like the Squeezeboxes, SONOS, nor with separate DACs fed by S/PDIF outputs from these devices or by USB directly from a computer. When you can get incredible sound from a $28 DVD player, why would you? But even Michael agrees that computer based audio is the future. Unfortunately, neither one of us knows which of these devices can be tuned to provide high performance. So there will be some trial and error to find an appropriate network device.

End Notes
Some of you reading this may be wondering just how different the tunable room is from the usual treated rooms that most of us end up with. It is different. The room vibrates as a harmonic whole, and you're sitting in the middle of all this vibration. Music takes on a fuller, more vivid character. By comparison, ordinary systems sound empty and thin by comparison. I can hear the music going on, but I'm not immersed in it like I am in the tunable room. And this is in addition to the astonishing clarity, dynamics and soundstaging that a well tuned room will have.

I had been hoping to have the room packed up and shipped to me the week after I left, but it's clear that there are things that remain to be done before the room can be shipped. Besides tuning in the room panels, he'll also construct a set of platforms and an entirely new set of redesigned PZCs. It's been a long haul, but we're in the final stretch and I'm looking forward to getting the room home more than ever.

Best regards,

Bill

Hi Bill & All

I believe that this type of post goes a long way to helping others learn the truth of High End audio from the reality of how music ultimately works instead of the way we look and perceive the value in face plates. The tunable room is by far the biggest component and matched (put in tune) skillfully with the long signal path that carries the music we can raise the bar to a much higher level than we thought possible.

Hearing this room break in is nothing but pure joy for me!

Hi Michael

I been rather curious about the rods you used for the canopies that top tuned the CD player and the Pioneer receiver in the system testing Bill333's room -- how are the lower ends of the down-rods terminated?

Sonic refers to the metal rods at the corners not the top tune down rods which are the nylon/resitone ones that I am using.

For the metal rods, there are no MTDs and the tips don't appear to be sharpened -- they look screwed into the platform surface. What did you do here?

Are the rods anything special ? They look different from the anodized rods you used to supply -- these are unfinished. Or are they just store bought mild-steel rods?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

These are zinc rods that are just siting on the surface of the platform board. The canopy boards are poplar.

Hi Michael and Bill333

How is that tuneable room ventilated. It appears to to be a sealed box and door. Any gaps between the panels and surfaces seem to be covered over from what Sonic can see in the pictures.

Won't it be stifling once the door is closed? What provision for fresh air ventilation, air condition/heating is there?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

The room will be in a conditioned environment. Wood vents will be put in after the room is delivered.

Hi Michael

What are the dimensions of that room?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

10' X 12' X 7.4' of powerful clean sound. I love this size. Yes, it fits in a typical 8' ceiling room. The room feels much bigger when you are inside cause of the size of the sound and the look of the wood.

I think when I do the next room like this for myself I will make it the same size.

IT'S HERE!!

I just took delivery of the room last Tuesday. It's stacked up in pieces in the basement right now, waiting for Michael to get here next Monday. We'll be putting it together and setting up a system all next week.

Here's a picture of the shipping pallets in my garage:


And here's everything after the pallets were unpacked and carried down to the basement:


At the moment I'm listening to the Magnavox DVD player while it's breaking in for the system. Some things I don't have yet and won't have for a while are the Quad platforms and the PZCs. I'm not sure how far we'll get without PZCs or Roomtunes, but we'll see.

Bill333

WOW! And you get a visit from Mr Tune to set the room up. Wonderful!

How much toe-in do you use on your Quads in your present set up?

Please post pictures regularly as your room comes together.

Sonic

Sonic,

I'd say the toe-in is about 15 degrees on the Quads. I'm not sure how they'll be set up once they're in the room. I would suppose they'll be pointing straight forward in the usual nearfield position. Since we have no way to adjust the height of the panels vertically or the amount of rockback, we may end up settling for a lower and/or different soundstage than we would if we had control over those things.

The Quads are temporary until the Classic 60s and associated equipment get finished, so I am not too concerned about it at this point. Right now, the main aim is to get the room up and sounding good. 'Screamin' sonics will be the point of stage 2 when Michael returns with the 60s and equipment stack in a couple months.

After 24 hours of break-in, the Magnavox DVD player is sounding surprisingly good. I took the top off, loosened the power cord and set it up on styrofoam and springs. It's still not the last word in detail and dynamics, but it hasn't been top tuned yet. What it is doing is producing a very natural, well balanced sound with good instrumental separation. Has anyone else tried this thing yet?

I'll definitely take pictures and post them as things move along.

Hi Bill333

Quads at 15 degrees -- that's fairly little given the reputed directionality of the tweeter panel in the centre. Must the power of the Tune giving you the treble since Quads in conventional rooms have a steep fall of in brightness, air and sparkle just a tad off axis -- at least that is what all the reviewers say.

While I have heard the Quad 57s, the ones I am more familiar with are the ESL 63s which didn't beam as much.

For CD players, there are now inexpensive Blu Ray universal players available from Philips, LG and couple of others. I am told they are superior to DVD players because of the improved servos required for Blu Ray playback. In my town you can pick one of these up for under US$100.

I may try tuning one myself.

Sonic

Here are some pictures of the build. We started on Tuesday morning and are hoping to finish by the end of the day on Thursday:

Day 1 - The floor framing is bolted together, shimmed up off the cement and leveled. The first row of the wall framing has been bolted together and placed on blocks next to the floor.



Day 2 - The floor panels have been fitted, and screwed onto the frames.



Day 2 - Wall framing is nearly complete; Michael ponders the meaning of the tune.

Just in case you didn't think anyone cared...

What's going on with the tunable room, eh?

Hi Robert and Bill333

Actually there is another one who's watching this project hawklike -- me.

While this room will eventually work wonderfully, how it can give a concert hall stage front , sides and rear with a 12 x 10 x 8 ft space is beyond me.

I have been of the understanding that you need space to get a sense of space, needing a time gap where the first reflections do not follow too quickly after the initial signal. Also pondering how anyone can sit long in it. Looking at the pix Michael given his height can reach up and touch the ceiling.

Did you feel claustrophobic when listening inside Bill333?

How well can the room stand up to variations in humidity? What's the peak humidity in Chicago?

This is the ultimate in the tune and the rest of us will have to make the most of our rooms.

Sonic

Hi Guys

Until Bill posts I will be happy to be a fill in representative.

Hi Michael and Bill333

Sonic also been wondering about the rug that was placed ahead of the listening chair and between the speakers (the 60s).

What's the rug for? What is its thickness and is it something from Ikea?

Also the room doesn't appear to need shutters or PZCs -- just some corner and echotunes plus one new style DRT with a piece of tuned wood leaning on it.

Is that all the treatment that is required to make the room sing?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

The rug being used in my place is from World Market and the one at Bill's seen below is from Pier 1 Imports.



I have found rugs to be a very useful tool when tuning the center mode in rooms. Finding the right rug (that doesn't over burn) can be a challenge. Now that Bill is in The Tunable Room he can tell you first hand how easy it is to over burn. In the average room it is much harder to tell how much of the music is missing from dampening but in The Tunable Room (where you hear everything) you can tell very quickly when something is over done. I wouldn't want to paint The Tunable Room as being overly critical from a negative view but more from the extreme opposite. The room is very musical and will tell you how to get the very most out of everything you put in it. As the room breaks in it takes on a "playing itself" type of sound. The rug in Bill's room may prove to be a little too big in the long run but for the short sprint it is wonderful. This would actually be a wonderful size rug for your room.

The rug is thin with a woven backing and a bamboo type grass woven top. I'm not sure but it sounds like a bamboo/cotton/poly (rayon or something like) blend.

The amount of product to be used in Bill's room will come down to Bill's ears but I'm making custom PZCs for the room now.

Pics of The Tunable Room after the trim was put up.

What be those brass things on the door -- three on the upright edge and two at the top?

Sonic

Hi Sonic

Those are spring loaded pressure locks. Instead of the door being in place by a single door lock I distribute the energy in 7 places. Between this and the in-wall tuner on the door you can match the sound of the door to the rest of the rear wall.