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Re: ready to buy mackie 824's for home hi fi........input appreciated

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I just randomly found this site via google when looking for reviews for the hrs120. I just did exactly what you guys have done w/ the mackies for home use. I'll post my impressions below. I hope they are useful.

I have been looking to upgrade my old stereo system (which to be honest is a open box pioneer mini system I bought for $400 openboxas an undergrad in I believe 1990).

After doing a lot of research on this and actually coming very close to going the HK3480/Axiom route I ended up buying two Mackie 824's this weekend. Currently I am just feeding them directly via RCA to a CD player and an airport express music server. I just placed an order for the behringer deq 2496 (which will serve as the room eq, RTA and DAC (it also has balanced XLR outs) and a cheap toslink optical switch to feed the airport express and cd audio to the behringer. This is for home stereo use for now w/ the possibility of buying some preamp like the outlaw 990 (which has balanced outputs) in the future. Basically the behringer is my poor peoples preamp.

My initial impressions are they are fantastically detailed and clean. Its a bit unreal to me to be honest. (Again I moved from a $400 mini system w/ a pioneer bookshelf speakers w/ 5" woofers) so this isn't exactly unexpected. You definitely can hear everything. Or more than everything in my case (aka thats in the song? weird!). I would go on but I'll end up sending like every other music speaker review but I am definitely *very* happy w/ them. Its somewhat easier to articulate the negatives, so let me focus on those. I definitely find them somewhat fatiguing. This may be due to the metal tweeter, the fact that I am not really used to the "straight up flat response" (most likely) or the fact that I am sitting most of the time 12-15 feet away on the otherside of my room and not exactly "near field" in my bedroom actually. The other somewhat negative thing is that I somewhat wish I had more bass. Again this may be due to the flat response, rather than the exaggerated "punchiness" of normal speakers. I'm somewhat curious myself and will use the behringer to see what it is I like and do not like in the sound as well as see what the room is doing as well as see if perhaps I can "improve" it.


While waiting for the 2496 to come in I did play a bit w/ the itunes equalizer actually. FYI we have our music ripped at 320k/mp3. I know drives are almost coming down in price to do lossless, at the time I ripped this was the most cost effective solution. One problem w/ the equalizer is the maddening delay because of the conversion but I couldn't really equalize it do give me a satisfactory bass response. Part of the problem right now may be that the bookshelves are sitting on two dressers at one end of the room and not on proper stands or wall mounted. The behringer equalizer will let me try this a bit more seriously.

I would love to do home theatre as an extension of this. I like keeping the audio signal digital, being able to muck w/ it and having a single dac w/ balanced outs. IE the entire path is D->whatever I want->D->XLR. The issue w/ home theatre is that as far as I can tell no one provides any sort of convertable digital out for the other channels. So if I wanted to RTA/equalizer my room externally using say the outlaw preamp it would be dvd->outlaw->XLR->D->XLR which seems somewhat wrong to me. I was hoping to find "pro" gear that didn't have this random "we must copy protect dvd surround channels" MPAA crippled interface but w/ no luck. (Actually meridian preamps do this, but they are somewhat unfeasibly priced)

In any case thats where I am. 2 Mackies 824. Soon to be deq 2496 RTA/equalizer acting as a preamp and DAC w/ xlr outs. I'd like to get the HRS 120 (or win the lottery and get the HRS 150) at some point and I'd love to have a home theatre type system that stays digital for the components and a single set of DACS at some point.

-best,
-bloo


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