Picture of tweaked OB's and some new gear

[Poultrygeist]

I added cork to the rear baffles ( Ikea placemats ) and reversed the super tweets to fire to the rear...reduces resonance and lessens the sizzle.

My gear rack from top to bottom: Bottlehead 2a3 Paramours, Bottlehead Foreplay III Preamp,Technics SL-1300 TT, Jolida JD9 Tube phono stage ( new ), Marantz SA8004 SACD player ( new ) and Dayton APA150 mono-blocks. RCA cables by Zu and Blue Jeans. Speaker cable by Walmart/Woods Patio Cord

[blackraven]

Very nice set up! I would love to hear it, I bet it sounds great!

[Poultrygeist]

BR, on your next southern vacation to Myrtle Beach, Charleston, or Florida stop by for a listen.

Man I love the home of Garrison Keillor and the land of beautiful lakes - there's one everywhere you turn but I froze there once in late August.

[E-Stat]

I added cork to the rear baffles ( Ikea placemats ) and reversed the super tweets to fire to the rear...reduces resonance and lessens the sizzle.

Cool. I use wool felt for damping the Advent tweeters.

With your dipoles, how far away from the back wall works best with that design?

[Poultrygeist]

They definitely need to be pulled out into the room and I usually pull them out 3 to 4 ft from the back wall depending on where I sit. My room is not good acoustically with lots of windows and hard surfaces but I don't find dipoles as room dependent as conventional speakers.

[E-Stat]

They definitely need to be pulled out into the room and I usually pull them out 3 to 4 ft from the back wall depending on where I sit.

That's a reasonable amount.

My room is not good acoustically with lots of windows and hard surfaces but I don't find dipoles as room dependent as conventional speakers.

Interesting. My current room is acoustically pretty good with non-parallel wall surfaces, inherently odd multiple room dimensions and the use of bass traps. But, distance to rear wall with my stats is very critical for the most linear bass response. After lots of experimentation and measurements, I found that 8 feet was the optimum distance. Using that distance, I got extremely flat response from 25 hz to 200 hz.

[cackalacky]

Very nice set up! I would love to hear it, I bet it sounds great!

It *does* sound great. Paul graciously and patiently showed my brother and I this system (he hadn't added the phono stage yet). It was the most impressive system of the 4 that we listened to. The experience was similar to the first time I heard panels (Maggie 1.7s)

The audio hobby/industry is perpetually choked with hype, glitter, and self-congratulatory chatter. When all the smoke clears and the dust settles, the audio hobbyist at any level can trust only his own ears. That being said (with the usual caveats of personal taste and of getting what you like/liking what you get), here is my take.

The coherence and imaging from this humble setup is phenomenal. I've heard the imaging described as *holographic* and that is a fitting description, especially with vocals, brass, strings, acoustic instruments. I would also add *magical* in the sense that the music we listen to is magical; emotional and experiential, far beyond bits and bytes and frequencies. I should probably add the word *addicting.* Our listening time passed far too quickly.

The only audio hobbyist subgroups that would find this system unsatisfactory would be the rock/metal high decibel screamers and hiphop/rap enthusiasts. Rock/pop fans who listen at reasonable levels, on the other hand, will be rewarded with accurate studio reproduction like they've likely not heard before.

I left Paul's house wondering how long it would take to get over the excitement of rediscovering music that I thought I was familiar with. Hearing textures and nuances previously hidden by coloration and/or poor combinations of high end gear is a really cool experience that I had thought was unattainable to those of us on blue collar budgets. Not so.

I'll leave it to Poultrygeist to divulge the $ he's got in this system, but I can confidently say this. High end audio is now very much available to Average Joe.

[Poultrygeist]

Thanks Doug,

My mantra continues to be "you don't have to spend high dollars to get high dollar sound". With simple hand tools, inexpensive parts, and following the lead of OB experts like Martin J. King

http://www.quarter-wave.com/Project08/Jordan.pdf

anyone can cobble together fine sounding speakers for not much money. I have less than $500 in these OB's but the Tang Bands have doubled in price over the last year but there are cheaper options for the main drivers.

For real economy I'd recommend first building the bottom H-frames ( the real heart and soul ), bi-amping them and with a satellite box speaker on top. One could get by with this forever. I have pictures in my gallery of this set up. The sub-killer H-frames would cost less than $150 to build a pair. They yield fast bass transients and unlike plodding subs are musical and play in stereo.

[SlumpBuster]

How do you like those Dayton Monoblocks? They are at the other end of the spectrum from the Bottlehead Monoblocks both in terms of price and design.

[Poultrygeist]

Big woofers like powerful solid state amps while small efficient full rangers can be quite revealing with flea powered SET's. Even though the Alphas are efficient their big cones must move lots of air in OB so power is needed. The Daytons together make 150 wpc but their best feature for my purposes is their selectable crossover control.