I have moved to a fully computer based set up as a source. No transport and none of those shiny disks any more.
The system has an open, huge soundstage, with very clean, tight bass that dives deep into two figure Hz.
The sound is very powerful and dynamic. Extremely detailed, but still warm, musical and believable and easy to listen to. With the right recording a reach out and touch holographic image and soundstage is possible.
I have been through quite a lot of equipment. I am and was a huge Audio Research fan for years, and I used their tube monos/preamps with great happiness.
I have pretty much always had planar speakers until recently. So I needed powerful amps to drive Magnepan2.6R/3.6R and Apogee Diva/Duetta sig etc.
I have moved to high sensitivity speakers in the form of the Avantgarde Trios now. This has enabled a move to very low powered SET amplifiers which has been great fun.
I have been searching for equipment that keeps the music free of colour and true to the recording. I believe you choose your source for its sound. The rest of the equipment should let the source do its magic as much as possible and get out of the way of the music.
This unit is modified with Mundorf silver/gold in oil caps, Mundorf tube cap, and Duelund VSF Cu caps. I use Emission Labs mesh plates 45 power tubes. A very refined and beautifully natural sounding amp. Very transparent.
DCS Scarlatti clock
Finest player in the world
Avantgarde Trio
19 ohm 109db/watt with 225 subs
DCS Scarlatti
State of the art number crunching.
PS audio Premier Power Plant
Power regenerator.
Analysis plus Golden oval XLR
Beautiful cable. Amazing detail and still warm and life like
Audio Magic Stealth XXX oyaide
Specially made with Oyaide XXX sockets and furutech input. Much more detailed than the Hydra it replaced
Apogee Duetta signature2 Heavily modified
These have the latest Graz ribbons both tweeter/mid and bass panels. I have external cross overs with mundorf silver/gold in oil caps and Alphacore foil inductors. Caddock resistors and all solid core silver wired. All suspended and vibration free. These apogees take much more power and go way louder and have much better dynamics than the original. Not only that but much improved sound quality. Simply stunning! I have had many planars magnepan etc but these really are the best in every way now. Long live Apogee and Thank goodness for Grazs search for perfection!
Virtual dynamics Revelation 2
This must be one of the only cables I have heard that when compared to cables that seem to "do nothing" or just pass signal untouched this cable does lots but in a good way! A staggering solid detailed sound, but a nightmare to plug in due to its size, weight and stiffness.
Virtual dynamics Master LE
Very nicely focused cable with very low noise floor. The best bass I have heard and startling dynamic speed
Oyaide SWO XXX/SWO GX
Its own spur and conditioned with various filters along the way before reaching the Stealth
Acoustic Revive RR-77
Sends out a very low frequency into the room which disrupts RFI EMI and makes you feel relaxed! Very odd but works well Seems to focus the mid range
Sonic studio Amarra
Bolt on for itunes
Auralex Lenrd Bass traps
I have 8 of these traps placed subtly in the corners of the listening room. They have done a very good job in a room that had quite tight bass anyway.
Weiss Medea plus
Latest super DAC. Volume control on Firewire input. Variable output voltage to match amps. stunning DAC
charles1dad, at such volume levels 2 watts will surely be plenty. I on the other hand sometimes have a few drinks and like to crank the volume to + 100 db levels. 2 watts won't be sufficient for me!
hi chadeffect, surprised that you find the 2 watts of the yamamoto sufficient to drive the trios. a friend once had a 6 watt chip amp on his omega duos and I remember that thing clipped in no time when you cranked the music a bit.
love to have 150 watts of the millenium on tap, sounds so effortless
i had pass aleph 2 mono blocks before the millenium and to my ears the millenium beat the aleph by quite a margin. no doubt the new first watt series is better than the old aleph series. if I wanted to try another amp I would have to get a dac and preamp first. too much hassle for me
hi chadeffect, I bought the Millenium MKII in '99 and upgraded to MKIII around 2006. I love it. in a friends system I once replaced a conrad johnson art pre, audio note dac 5se and audionote note keigon amps. driving 1st generation wilson maxx speaker. the millenium easily matched that extremely expensive tube gear in the musical department. the owner of that gear was shocked! actually the sound was almost indistingushable from each other, it was so close. and this was with a stock MKII.
I does not even have a volume control in it's signal path. it is just changing the voltage which is being switched and therefor keeping it's resolution down to milliwatt levels. heard trio with large audio research tube amps recently and a few years ago with very expensive and powerful tenor amps. in both cases sound was good at high volume but totally collapsed at low volumes. no so the millenium! plus it is extremely quite. you can crank it up, stick your ears into the tweeter horn and hear absolutely nothing!I doubt that dsp will sound any better in the future. once you change the response in the digital domain something negative is happening. I'm glad that I have the possibility to cut some bass peaks in the subout only without affecting mid and high frequencies.
I have also a quite simple setup. a dedicated highend hd transport, the millenium and lyngdorf amp for the bass. everything is powered by a pure power unit, all equipment is on sra platforms. keep your system simple and the slippers on. once you have managed to time align the drivers you will be in heaven!
I have some experience with roomcorrection and dsp. bought a tact rcs in '99. use it now as a measurement tool only. that thing is adding quite a bit of digitis to the sound. my heavily modded tact millenium has got a lot of dsp function which I can control per computer. the millenium is driving the horns of my duo only. it has a sub output connected to another lyngdorf amp drving lyngdorf subs especially designed to be placed into the corner behind the main speaker. on the horns I only use delay which does not harm the sound at all. as soon as you put in a filter, change the frequency response the sounds becomes digital. for me dsp used on mid and high frequencies is a no no. no problems with delay though.
I use eq and a low pass filter on the sub output only.
In your case if your main objective is to time align all 4 drivers keep the amp you already love and do the alignment as I have suggested. adding several amps, a dsp device will complicate your system a lot, not to mention all those additional cables, isolating platforms etc.
better spend some money on fancy caps like duelund or v-caps, just me 2 cents.
there is a long winter coming so still plenty of time to play with sub placement.
had a friend who bought trios with bass horns after he heard my duos (selling his $70K) kharmas).
I never liked the basshorns in his setup. no, they had great bass but the bass was never integrated with the main speakers. he had the basshorns placed some 2 meters behind the main speakers and I guess must have had around 10 msec delay. told him to move the basshorns in front of main speakers towards the site of the room in order to time align them but that guy was too lazy to do it. ultimately he sold the trios. another thing is the basshorns are way to small to load the drivers down to 20 hz. they need a lot of eq to make then flat. for the money of the basshorns I would rather buy 2 pairs of 231 subs. just some food for thought....
I'm sure your trios sound fantastic with all your tweaking. major weak point in all avantgardes is time alignment as I have mentioned before. don't move your main speaker, just the subs! and later try to find a way to move the mid and tweeter horn back.
once your have setuo avantgardes properly and tweaked them a bit it is difficult if not impossible to go back to low efficiency speakers. they all sound dynamically compressed, especially all those planars like maggies and ml.
one more thing, heard the new231 subs recently. these are quite large and in a different league than the 225 subs. in case you have some cash to burn in the future....
they seem expensive but if you consider how much people spent on power cords etc they are not really that expensive. in car terms the mundorfs are in porsche 911 territory and the v-caps in F1! have not heard the duelunds so I can't comment on them.
many years ago I tried jensen copper PIO as main and small bypass cap. at that time I though the bypass cap increased low level resolution in an artificial manner and I removed it after a while. difficult for me to imagine that it will be any good bypassing the mundorf with small v-cap or duelund.
let me know how it goes with the sub placement. I think 2 feet in front of the basshorn is a good starting point
it's true the original duos used the standard supreme caps. I don't think bypassing is a good idea in speaker xo. tried it once. sounded artificial to me. if you order v-caps make sure to ask chris to put them on his cable cooker for a couple of days!!! if you do this upgrade try it on the tweeter first. the midrange cap will have a larger value ($$$) + midrange cap is not in series with the driver so so the effect will be smaller I guess.
I heard the new duo omega g2 series at a dealer in singapore recently driven by very high end tube electronics. they use the silver/gold in oils as well. co comparison with the v-cap to my ears.
removing the horns from the frame will surely have benefits since the vibration from the subs can't reach the horns. in my case I use the subs only as a stand for the frame.
let me know how you get on with the time alignment issue. you could start by putting your subs roughly 2 feet in front of your horns. the build in amp delays the signal around 2 msec! that's a long time!!
I think replacing the mundorfs with the v-caps is a must. this will also greatly benefit the midrange ! my duos use 3,3 uF for the tweeter cap. this is the largest value v-cap makes. not sure what value is been used in the trios. for larger values you can always parallel several caps. a friend did this tweak on the original 8 ohm duos and talked about doors being opened. the difference is really amazing. much bigger than any cable change! beware of a long break in!!
I use first generation of vd master speaker cables. they sound great on the avantgardes but as you said, stiff and heavy and those damned magnets.
regarding time alignment, this is a very weak point of any avantgarde speaker. just check out stereophiles measurement of uno nano. look at the step response. tweeter arrived 0,75 msek earlier than the midrange. this is a very long time!! some time in the feature will buy trios as well. I will have to think about a mechanical construction allowing me to push the midrange and tweeter horns back. this will be much more challenging than with the duos.
the duos midrange horn does not use any xo. even though it does not produce much below 200 hz the cone is moving quite a bit with loud bass heavy music. removing the rear cap allows the drivers back wave to escape. this resulted in a more open midrange. the speaker is better disappearing. give it a try, costs nothing.
almost forgot, 2 other things I did. filling those hollow tubes with sand plus putting harmonix rf999 feet under the speaker. these feet are quite expensive but like the v-caps are worth every penny IMO
hi! I have followed this thread and your journey getting the best sound out of your trios with great interest. I'm using duos since 2000 and upgraded to omega drivers a few years ago. I'm driving my duo with a class d-amp which converts pcm directly to pwm. this amp basically is a dac, pre and power amp in one unit. less is more!
over the years I have tweaked my duos quite a bit and it is amazing how much better they can sound with some tweaking! I thought I share my findings. maybe you would like to tweak your trios a bit and find some of my tweaks useful.
the by far biggest improvement I gained by changing the mundorf silver/gold caps incl. the cpc unit in the tweeter xo with teflon v-caps. it's amazing how much music gets lost/how much dynamics get compressed in those mundorfs!
other things I have done: changing the plastic covered wbt binding post with next gen ones. changed the internal wiring to audio note soldered cables with silver solder directly onto the driver and tweeter xo built an external box for tweeter xo removed the rear plastic cap of the midrange horn.
latest tweak was building a wooden block for the tweeter cylinders and moved them back to time align tweeter with midrange. it's amazing what happens when the heights are time aligned with the midrange! with digital delay I have already time aligned the horns to my external corner subs (using the duo sub only as a stand for the horns)
