Well, we finally decided our experiment of having the bass towers INSIDE the main towers had gone on long enough.
The speakers were fairly easy to move, though both of us participated in a you push you pull fashion. The Black Diamond Racing Cone pucks slide pretty easily across the carpet – but, especially in the case of the heavier bass units, the relatively high friction of the plush wool carpet sometimes causes the cone feet fall off of the pucks and the speaker tips a little bit and Neli accuses me of reckless driving [it IS kind of dangerous when the towers are close to each other, we really, really (add more reallys as you see fit) wouldn’t want the two titans to tip one into the other!].
The main towers are about 6 inches closer together.
The original reason the main towers were positioned on the outside of the bass units was to try and get a wider sound stage than what we had before. And it worked.-
But over time we worried that we were loosing some coherence, solidity and stability in the imaging and soundstaging. It was really pretty darn goooood, don’t get me wrong, but we felt we had reached a limit as to what we could do. We want more, MORE!
So, the initial impressions? Well, we have more positioning to do… 🙂 BUT… the soundstage is perhaps even wider than before – so we are good to go on that front. But solidity etc. was perhaps a little worse than before.
Darn! The just-plopping-them-down-somewhere-near-where-we-thought-they-should-go technique failed us once again [you know, it DOES sometimes work, and, seriously, rolling the dice this way does lead to some discoveries about specific room-speaker interactions that the strict-placement methodologists would never discover].
Anyway, I am hopeful that having nothing between the main towers will improve imaging. Makes sense, right, because the bass towers were acting like some kind of really strangely configured equipment rack between the speakers that are generating all the music’s location cue frequencies.
However, that said, we sure are tempted to at least put SOME of the equipment on a rack between the speakers sometimes – so that [most likely the digital] part of the system can be cabled with pure, 100%, high-octane cables like the Jorma Design PRIME [who needs to imbibe anymore?], Audio Note PALLAS [who needs Carnegie Hall anymore?], and Nordost Odin [who needs components anymore?].
Well, I exaggerate [a little :-)], but hopefully have also communicated why we are tempted to put a rack up front sometime – the heck with imaging [well, the rack WOULD be pretty far back from the main towers …so its impact WOULD be really minor, right?].
But the 2nd-rack-in-the-center would probably be turntable less, and have us still run the turntable from the side of the room. Why? Because stepping over maps and around cables and power cords is annoying at best, and with turntables, it just makes putting on an LP more about tip-toeing through the equipment than ‘Oh! Let’s hear THIS!’. I guess CDs are just so Slam Bam Play that it is not quite as perverted of an experience. Maybe it is because everyone has their preferred position to stand in when putting on an LP, and we just feel more comfortable when a $30K (or $80K) amp is not bogarting in our fav-o-rite location. Anybody else feel that the usability of centrally located racks is a little less than desirable?
Anyway, time for the speaker location tweaking process – which usually takes awhile… argh.
