UPDATE 12/13/2023
Upgraded my PC with a 4090 Founders Edition Nvidia video card. The built in cooling is so efficient I bypassed the water cooling for it and now just the RAM and processor are water cooled. I got a horizontal mount for it which looks great and upgraded the M.2 drive to an ultrafast low latency model for the gaming side and I kept the old drive for my trading side of the computer.
UPDATE 09/01/2023
It’s taken some time to get the dspNexus up and running. I had to cut and re-solder my XLR connections because the MiniDSP used a terminal block and the dspNexus uses high quality XLR connections. Designing my system in Audio Weaver was intuitive but I had issues with the High Precision Biquad filter which wasn’t accepting my numbers and would error out. The team at Danville Signal Processing was a huge help and worked with me over a number of live sessions to troubleshoot the issues. It turns out we had to create 12 simple biquad filters in a series and everything worked. The other strange thing was that the output from Multi Sub Optimizer had to have the a1 and a2 coefficients reversed in polarity (there is no set standard on how these are represented). Anyway how does it sound? It is transcendental, the high quality DACs on each channel are velvety smooth. We are in a new apartment from when most of my profile pics were taken and only two walls are parallel, the rear wall is at a different angle than the front wall, the kitchen creates a trap, it could be the perfect room as evidenced with the room correction results. When listening you can’t help but smile. We spent the entire day playing varied music from all genres. Many were recorded very well and had an eerie realism, perfect imagery, it was/is jaw dropping. At no point was there any listener fatigue even though we had the system at a fairly loud level. I can notice how big a difference it makes using the hardware to reduce the dB of the subs rather than software which causes reduced dynamic range. I’m really impressed with the dspNexus and the team at Danville Signal Processing. This is the largest change in my system in many years and I’m blown away.
Of note I had to use my PC I built for all of this, my little old Mac was overheating. It’s now relegated to being a music server only. It is also fun and convenient that the unit has Bluetooth which you can stream from your phone (tooling around the house) or Apple TV which is great because now my Apple remote actually works for the volume. I don’t notice any dynamic range limitation on movies. Each source volume is remembered by the unit as well which is really nice.
UPDATE 07/16/2023 I met Al Clark at AXPONA and asked to be an early adopter of the dspNexus. It’s going to function at twice the fidelity of my MiniDSP. I can’t wait to hear the system operating at this level! Delivery is set for this week! I also heard Clarisys speakers for the first time and was blown away.
UPDATE 04/04/2021 I drew up a design for speaker stands for the Kinergetics and Grant made them perfectly. His custom work is amazing. As fantastic as the speakers are their stands were a total afterthought with poor construction. These new stands are stable adjustable and really isolate the speakers from the floor.
UPDATE 11/28/2021 I was able to get add an Eames Lounge Chair to the living room. They created a tall version and my life changed. I’ll have it forever, it’s the most comfortable chair ever made.
UPDATE 11/17/20 & 07/02/2021 my wife just ordered me Mye Stands from Mye Sound for Christmas. I’ve read about them for years in the forums and they have rave reviews and can’t wait to get them into my system. I’m also planning on building custom cable risers that get them off the floor and also isolate them from each other. That’s one issue with an active set up that is hard to avoid (so many cords). I’ll be doing some surgery as well reducing the length where I know things won’t change, time to get my nice soldering iron out and pure silver solder. . . Update: The stands sound amazing, everything is tighter and more articulate. They are rock solid, the speakers used to sway and the don’t move a millimeter now. I haven’t had time to do anything else with work getting crazy. It looks like it will be some time before I can get back to the system.
UPDATE 06/05/20: I was out of work for some time and took the opportunity to build a custom gaming PC. My daughter and her boyfriend are really into PC gaming and they have encouraged me to build one for awhile so we can talk about games and play together. She never got my audio bug, lol. It displays in 4K, HDR with Ray Tracing. I can’t believe how real these games are now. It’s like playing a movie, especially at 144” with zero lag. For those of you who are into these things it’s running 8 cores at 5Ghz with a Nvidia 2080 Ti founders card also overclocked. RAM, Video Card, and processor are all liquid cooled by my custom loop. I’ve got a 1Tb M.2 drive mounted to the motherboard, Aorus Master, which is screaming fast. No music on this puppy, that’s all run through my MAC. It’s been a fun project!
UPDATE 04/27/19: Had read a suggestion in the forum to vertically bi-amp, I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before but I had my system horizontally bi-amped with identical consecutively serial numbered amps. Vertically bi-amping added a lot of punch, both my wife and I noticed it right away. After a month of critical listening it’s definitely a keeper.
UPDATE 01/04/18: Moved and updated the room specs and a few pics. I’m in a much bigger space and was able to do room correction last weekend. All I can say is wow. What a difference the room makes. I also discovered how to input 12 biquad filters per speaker and have gotten the distortion down to 2.6%. All the subs working together in the space is a revelation. I now have a movie and a music setting because I had the subs at -20db at first which was a little bass heavy for music but boy does it make movies exciting (bone shaking.) Critical listening has the subs at -25db for perfect seamless integration. If you can get four subs to do room correction, do it ASAP in my opinion, it makes a world of difference. Just an FYI on set up the Maggies are running full range as well as the subs, I let Multi Sub Optimizer build the filters off of full range operation and optimized for my main listening position only and it is an interesting exercise to see what the slopes are and how high the subs will play to assist in the room correction.
My system was hit by lightening and it came through the coax cable and took out the cable box, video processor and projector. I added a P15 Powerplant to protect the system from all the brownouts, dirty power, and lightening in this area. The advantage of the P15 is huge and unexpected. Initially I had the main subs only functioning upon move in and I would bury the bias needle on my Pass Amp on some movie transients and it shut down my power unit due to the 1200 watt power draw. Adding the other subs to the system they put out much more power working together, are more accurate, and barely move the power needle on my P15 which has loads of room to spare now even at maximum listening levels. The system is quieter with the P15 and has more punch due to the clean power on demand. I also just discovered the variable multiwave feature and bumped up the available pool of capacitance on demand to the equipment, what a great addition. The usability is really high as now the entire system starts and turns off in order, timed delays, soft start to ease electrical inrush, at the push of one button, what a luxury.
This is the culmination of 20 years of patience. I had an old school Sansui receiver with Dynaco speakers for many years while I saved up for my dream system. I was first exposed to High Fidelity living in Europe visiting the Sony Center in Berlin. A black glass elevator with white light lit corners brought my friend and I to a black marble/glass floor with dim pure white light in the corners with a hallway ending in endless darkness. A person greeted us in an all black suit and tie and asked if we wanted to hear the ultimate musical reproduction ever produced. Before us were two large speakers with nickel sized speaker wire coming out and a huge CD player and amp. He put in a violin concerto with a weighted CD that made my hair stand up with pinpoint realism imaging and staging. I could hear the strings vibrating, the musician breathing like he was 5ft away. We listened to music for three hours and it only felt like 20 min. How much? Not for sale, custom made. . . His best guess $150k. What was the mystery CD? DVD-A (new format) Why present something that wasn't for sale? To show how good music reproduction could get. Me? Hooked. I love live music, listened to my father put on two hour concerts via grand piano as a child, sang in Madison Boys Choir, and I played bassoon in Wisconsin Youth Symphony. There is nothing like the real thing; sound actually vibrating through your body.
After years of AXPONA visits, dealer gear listens and research I knew I wanted to have an active set up with room correction and Magnepan 20.1s as my backbone. I needed fast subwoofers to keep up with the Maggies and looked for years to acquire Kinergetics SW-800s to be driven by a Pass Labs X-250, found both and owned them four years without being able to play them until now. I have a Mac Mini maxed out with dual SSD drives driven by JRiver to optical out. I was lucky to sell my house and be able to buy my Maggies from my dealer and literally got the last new pair of 20.1s out of the factory. The Maggies are being driven by two Benchmark AHB2 amps highs/lows which are dead quiet S/N ratio better than most pre-amps, power doubling down to two ohms with amazing clarity and grip but zero harshness. I have everything running out of my Mini DSP with balanced connections (Benchmark Canare Star Quad Construction) which is processing all filters at 56bit/ 96kHz. Room correction is done by way of Room EQ Wizard, Multi-Sub Optimizer, and Earthworks M30 microphone. To take advantage of the program I've added two new super fast fully enclosed SVS SB-16 Ultra 16" subwoofers (1500W Mosfet class D amps) to make the room response flat, accurate, and help keep my neighbors from calling the cops. The result is musical bliss which is pitch perfect 16Hz to 20kHz; perfect staging, imaging, accuracy and the best sounding system I have ever heard in my humble opinion. I'm thrilled and am now starting to explore all the amazing recordings out there.
This system is paired with a Sony 4K Projector with HDR using a Lumagen video processor. This all projects on a custom acoustically transparent screen 11ft x 5ft with velvet boarders and side panels that rise for 2.40:1 movie experience from the 16:9 TV ratio. The Lumagen has upgraded 18Ghz inputs and outputs using an iPro 2 colorimeter and iDisplay 3 spectrophotometer with Chromapure for color correction at 4913 points on screen.
