Measurements
I estimated the Revel Salon's B-weighted sensitivity as 87dB/2.83V/m, a mite higher than the specification. However, the Salon is basically a 4 ohm loudspeaker, drawing 2W from the amplifier to achieve its sensitivity rating. Its impedance also varies depending on whether or not the rear tweeter is on or off, and on the settings of the three tone-control switches. Fig.1 shows the worst-case impedance: with the rear tweeter on, the boundary compensation set to "-," and the front tweeter to "+1." Even so, the magnitude doesn't drop significantly below 4 ohms and the electrical…
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Fig.4 shows the Salon's quasi-anechoic response, averaged across a 30 degrees horizontal window on the tweeter axis and spliced to the complex sum of the responses of the lower-frequency units below 300Hz. Under these conditions, the speaker's bass extension just fails to reach 20Hz, by a hertz or so. In a room, as LG found, the Salon will descend below 20Hz. There appears to be a slight lumpiness in the lower-bass/upper-bass integration region, but, again, this could well be a measurement artifact. (Calculating the true LF response of such a complicated speaker involves quite a lot of what…
Vertically, the Revel's tweeter is a very high 47" from the floor, which at first worried me: Was I doing the right thing by measuring the response on the tweeter axis? (In the three-dimensional puzzle you have to solve when doing a set of speaker measurements, it helps to choose an easily repeatable axis for the microphone. In this respect, the tweeter is the best choice.) But as fig.7 reveals, the Salon's balance hardly changes over a wide window, thanks to its use of high-order crossover filters. As long as the listener's ears are between 36" and 50" from the floor, he or she will hear…
"I can't make out the words."
My wife was right. I knew I had the lush-sounding, rearmost pair of omni mikes too high in the mix, but I had so wanted her to listen to the first edit of "Silent Night." When I assemble a performance on the digital audio workstation, I'm not listening at all to the music, except in fragments as I work from the producer's notes and fine-tune each crossfade so that one take seamlessly slides into the next. But when I finally sat back to listen to the finished product, not only did Brian Arreola's arrangement, with its shifting time signatures, breathe new…
I double-checked the setup; all appeared to be working. I pressed Record on the Nagra, the Tascam, and the two computers, said "Rolling" to producer Erick Lichte, sitting next to me in the control room, and we were off with "Hodie Christus natus est," a chant that the singers got in three complete takes. Five days and 15 hours of eight-channel takes later, I set off for home with 14 Nagra open-reel tapes, eight Tascam Hi-8 tapes, and two hard drives—all in all, some 70 gigabytes of data for me to work on back in the comfort of my own listening room.
Comfort
As is my custom, each…
Sidebar 1 Comfort and Joy: Musicians & Music
Cantus is: Brian Arreola, Bradley Cramer-Erbes, Michael Hanawalt, Albert Jordan, Peter Zvanovec (tenors); Kelvin Chan, Alan Dunbar, Adam Reinwald (baritones); Tom McNichols, Tim Takach (basses); joined on Comfort and Joy: Volume Two by David Hagedorn (tambourine, bongos, djembe, drum kit), Alan Dunbar (frame drum, acoustic guitar, assorted percussion), Tim Takach (percussion, egg), Erick Lichte and Michael Hanawalt (percussion), Brian Arreola (double bass), and John Atkinson (bass guitar).
Volume One (CTS-1204): Track Listing…
Sidebar 2 Comfort and Joy: Recording Details
Erick Lichte & Cantus, production
John Atkinson, engineering, editing, mixing, mastering
Tim Takach, CD package design
Recorded in Sauder Hall, Goshen College, Goshen, IN, June 16–21, 2004, except:
"Deck the Halls" vocals recorded by Tom Mudge at Studio M, Minnesota Public Radio, St. Paul, MN, December 16, 2004; "Deck the Halls" 1964 Fender Precision bass guitar recorded using a PJB Bass Briefcase in Brooklyn, NY, July 13, 2005.
Microphones & Preamplifiers: Two DPA 4006 omni mikes, wide-spaced, with…
Theta makes a power amp?
That's what I wondered about those big, gleaming amps at Theta's home-theater-centered demo a CES or two back. Yes, they made a nice sound, but I know Theta as a premier producer of digital preamplifiers, digital disc players, DACs, and, more recently, multichannel preamplifier-processors. Naïvely, I assumed that these new power amps were actually OEM units wearing Theta badges.
Wrong. Theta's amps are originals endowed with some fairly innovative design ideas. The line includes the imposing Citadel 400W monoblock that Jonathan Scull reviewed in…
Two + Two = Four
Well, if two 100W channels ain't quite enough, the Intrepid has more. Because the Sonic Frontiers Line-3 preamp has duplicate pairs of XLR and RCA outputs, I next undertook to biamplify the speakers by using four of the Intrepid's five channels. I heard no significant changes in balance between XLR and RCA, but now, when a low-frequency surge came by, there was some heft to it.
Well, if two 100W channels ain't quite enough, the Intrepid has more. Because the Sonic Frontiers Line-3 preamp has duplicate pairs of XLR and RCA outputs, I next undertook to biamplify the speakers by using four of the Intrepid's five channels. I heard no significant changes in balance between XLR and RCA, but now, when a low-frequency surge came by, there was some heft to it.
Running back through my torture discs, I confirmed that, while meeting the power requirements of the B&W S800s at full cry was simply asking too much of even a well-behaved 100Wpc amp,…
All Five Channels at Work
Having toiled to make this system work at all, I was glad that, when I'd finally gotten it running, it worked beautifully. With the five channels of the Intrepid driving five Paradigm speakers, the amp's clarity and resolution were easily appreciated. In contrast to my experiences with the big Revel and B&W speakers, the Intrepid gave the Paradigm Reference Studio/60s and Studio/20s all the low frequencies they could handle. Indeed, the Intrepid smoothed the integration of the low bass and midbass.
Having toiled to make this system work at all, I was glad that, when I'd finally gotten it running, it worked beautifully. With the five channels of the Intrepid driving five Paradigm speakers, the amp's clarity and resolution were easily appreciated. In contrast to my experiences with the big Revel and B&W speakers, the Intrepid gave the Paradigm Reference Studio/60s and Studio/20s all the low frequencies they could handle. Indeed, the Intrepid smoothed the integration of the low bass and midbass.
With stereo sources, the Intrepid drove the Studio/60s…