Three years to get around to my own install.

[geolemon]

Don’t think your cat likes the imaging...


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Hey, you know what-
This cat is aggressively affectionate. She's there because she is about to jump on my lap and throw her front paws on my shoulder to force me to hold her. She does it all the time. This time was different.

I had it a little loud, so it could just been that (but it was just as loud where she was)...
...but when she got in my lap, about to do her usual "paws on the shoulder, trick dad to hold me" trick - instead, she was suddenly distracted, and her head turned towards the mirror, and I saw her look back and forth a little.
Then she did turn to me and grab my shoulder like she usually did without hesitation.

I really wonder if she suddenly jumped into that audible illusion, the sweet spot that I'd been setting up - her head sure spun around like "Holy cow, something is there! But... I"m not seeing it! Where is it? Oh well - hug."
So maybe that's actually also a good sign.

I also tested this with my Fiancee, who - oh my god - couldn't be more of a polar opposite to me. I often avoid listening to music pretty much anywhere because the experience will be disappointing, where she's always got her phone out listening to music on the damn awful tiny tinny speaker (despite our having plenty of good, decent sized bluetooth speakers around). So I stuck her in front of it with a Madonna track that was imaging pretty good - I mean these are 3" speakers with tweeters so it's hardly a life-changing experience, but I asked her to tell me where she was hearing the image center, the stage width, the stage depth... and she gave all the right answers, pretty much the same as my observations...
...momentarily encouraging...
...then stood up and said "I don't care about any of that. I just want to hear the music."

[Ge0]

[I]

on;62016]

I'm using my lunch break today to set it up, clean it up (these things got dusty, in storage), and by this evening things should be safely dry, no wet surface cleaner residue, and should be good to power it up and see if this has promise as the holy grail I've been wishing for.
No pressure.

Hopefully more to come this evening.




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Love your A/V equipment stand .

Ge0

[geolemon]

[I]

Love your A/V equipment stand .

Ge0

Literally the tote I hauled it out of my storage unit in.

One of these days I'll go through all these shelves and bins and thin the collection.
Decades of car audio stuff - everything from used old RCA cables to a working Phoenix Gold Cyclone. I'm realistically not going to use most of it, and this storage unit is a couple hundred a month (not that I don't have other stuff in here too).

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[geolemon]

So here's my next setup...

I have a couple acoustic drop ceiling tiles down since I'm doing they repair work down here, and they look a lot like the material Ohm used in their drivers to control reflections.

This of course wouldn't be how it would be implemented in a car - I'm thinking of close-coupling and hiding it like Ohm did, if this turns out to help anything.

I'm even still wanting to mock up an Ohm-style setup, to do an A/B comparison to this...
I thought I had some MDF bookshelf test boxes for small speakers, but didn't find them in the storage unit. I'll go back and dig a little deeper, but I probably tossed them at some point. Probably have to build a new pair. Just a minor delay.

Lots of work meetings today but looking forward to listening to how this changes the image...

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[geolemon]

So - last set of listening sessions with the Mirages has been interesting.
Playing with the foam ceiling panels - it makes a difference. It fixes the imaging in the midrange - it was almost there before, it really brings out the illusion. But the tweeters - I feel like I can locate the tweeters until I get low enough (these are only on barstools - and I'm on an office chair) that I'm parallel with the tweeter reflecting discs. So eventually, I'll make the discs a little bigger to see if that helps.

So I also scrounged at my storage unit again, seeing what wideband drivers I still had over there. I found a pair of nice TangBand 2" widebands, and two slightly different flavors of the Aura Whisper 3" neo drivers.
I brought home a pair of Infiniti Kappa 3.25's also - but pulled them out and the surround foam was shot. Oh well.
...and I brought home two of my BG Neo3 PDR magnetic planars. Why not.

I grabbed a pair of test cabinets and a pair of JL crossovers. So I cut a couple adapter plates for the 2" and 3" from scrap birch ply to top-mount the TBs and Auras.

First listen - wow. I actually can't believe these are from my wideband reject pile. To be fair, my initial auditions were totally different - a traditional on-axis bookshelf.

And I'm not planning on running such small drivers, but I'm glad I started here, since I can hear how they play all the way up the whole frequency spectrum. No tweeters needed.

I'm almost more impressed than the Mirages... Maybe there's something to that "Z Reviews" guy merely liking the Mirages, but declaring the Ohms "the best speakers ever" and replacing his whole front stage.
And honestly, I could work with these.
It shows that omni-effect does work up high.
Which is interesting because Ohm runs tweeters across their lineup.

Can't wait to try the Aura - it's a mismatched pair, but I have a matched pair headed my way.

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[mikeyt]

It's like the search for the holy grail and we're doing all we can to find it..haha

[geolemon]

It's like the search for the holy grail and we're doing all we can to find it..haha

That's SO true.

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[geolemon]

So - I set up the fiberglass panels on the sides again, and two narrower ones behind the boxes.

My thought was "Since the Ohm drivers have sound absorbing material behind the woofer, to help them disappear when near a wall - this will make an improvement!"

I only had a few minutes to listen to a few tracks, like 10 minutes...
...but I could tell already. It didn't. Suddenly my speakers were easily locateable.

The good news is - a car dash top is filled with reflective surfaces (one reason I'm tucked onto this particular nook in my basement). So this may be a good path.

The bad news is - it's a reminder that acoustics change everything, with even subtle changes to the environment.
Not that "absorbing all the side and back reflections" is subtle - but I am still planning to make a more realistic area to mock stuff up under...
Listening in a partially disassembled car is one thing, but I really want to put the time in even before that point. I want those to be the final adjustment decisions.
Plus - I have to disassemble my ENTIRE dash.

I'm kicking myself now for recently tossing the back glass from a VW that I used to have sitting around. That would have been a good makeshift windshield analog to suspend over the top with some Civic-sized A pillars, since both are going to impact things greatly.

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[mikeyt]

Where's the Knights Templar of Audio when you need them...haha

[Ge0]

Literally the tote I hauled it out of my storage unit in.

One of these days I'll go through all these shelves and bins and thin the collection.
Decades of car audio stuff - everything from used old RCA cables to a working Phoenix Gold Cyclone. I'm realistically not going to use most of it, and this storage unit is a couple hundred a month (not that I don't have other stuff in here too).

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That reminds me. I have boxes and boxes of old RCA cables, Coaxial cable television cables, and IDE hard drive ribbon cables. With various ROKU devices and TV's scattered arounf the house I highly doubt I will be needing these. Oh, and all my modern HD storage is either NVME M.2 or USB-C connected flash drives. I probably don't need a bunch of 20 year old hard drive technology laying around.

My basement flooded with 27" of poo water back in 2014. I thought the restoration company would have dumped a lot of this at that time. But no, it still lingers on...

Ge0