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Hi,I`am new at this site and I been reading some of the inputs on this forum and find it very interesting project.
-Would be great if you guys out there could mention something about with which kind of music the "Prometheus" works best with.How does the speaker react to female voices,country,blues,hardrock etc..
I àm more into alt.country,blues ,rock etc.. such as Steve Earle,Neil Young and harder stuff as well.
-Do you guys recommend to go for the upprade kit or can I live with the standard kit to start with.
Follow Ups:
Michael,
Try reading "Are you on the road to audio hell" at www.audionote.co.uk. If a speaker is accurate it should bring forth whatever is on the software. A really good speaker that is described as "good with classical" or "good with rock" usually means that it has a lot of limitations that different types of music brings out.
"Rock" speakers lack microdynamics, "small ensemble" types lack the macrodynamics that other types of music requires. That is why we have a subtitle on our website, "No Compromises". If you find yourself making excuses for your system's limitations because "it really does the midrange right" or something lame like that, it's time to get a divorce from that system. You will hear such a difference even after just a 100-200 hour break-in from "normal" speakers that you will not be able to listen to something else again without thinking "It's too bad they aren't really hearing the music". I was just a typical guy at a show when I heard the old Prometheus I's and knew that I had found the potential for a really musical sounding system.
Regarding your second question, I would go for the top level kit and be done with it. Unless you are a avid kit builder and like messing with things constantly, "Buy the best and cry once"! Do you want to break in the darn things TWICE? Ouch!!!! The regular tweeters don't take as much time to break in as the upgraded units but why break in the wideband and then a year later have to endure another couple hundred hours of less than blissfull sound. Also, you may want to get a break in disc from AudioAdvisor to speed the process. Hope this helps. BTW, Steve Earle's Train A' Coming sounds killer on the speakers.
Tony Landry
www.audiospecialtiesofnm.com
I have had these speakers since November 05 however did not complete building them untill Feb 06. The break in time is brutal however well worth the wait. I listen to alot of different music mainly jazz but also Steve Earle, Neil Young, Lucinda Williams, Tortoise and Bork to name a few. What these speakers will do though is make the rest of your system transparent and show there weaknesses.
I've had my Mark II's (with the regular tweeters, not the Airforce tweeters) fully broken in and set up in my 300B SET system for about five or six months now.Some speakers I've had in the past have been limited to particular types of music for best performance. I haven't had that experience with the Mark II's. I've found they are so revealing that they do justice to intimate little recordings with lots of ambience. I've also found they are so dynamic, sensitive, and robust that they do justice to big arrangements or hard-driving performers. And they sound to me like they're covering a wider frequency range than the single-driver speakers I've owned or heard in the past, so I don't have to worry about missing out on instrumentation at the frequency extremes.
I'm happier with Prometheus in my listening room than I have been with any other speaker. I still wish I could get 5-10db more relative energy at 20-30Hz, 200-400Hz, and 8kHz-18kHz, but this dissatisfaction is more on an analytical level and it doesn't really affect my enjoyment of the presentation I'm getting out of my system. In fact, these speakers open the door to lower-power direct-coupled amps like 2A3 and 45s, so I'm looking forward to getting even more out of my system in the future.
One word of warning: the break-in period is hundreds of hours and I found the speakers to sound like complete and total crap during this time. I found them unlistenable and had to break them in down in the garage. Don't sell your old speakers until you're sure the new ones are broken in to your satisfaction!
Hi,The amplitude inbetween 200Hz-400Hz depends a lot on perfect phasing of the woofers and the distances of the o.b.- panels to the side- walls. The amplitude above 8Khz can be lifted by adding a .22Mf- cap in parallel to the 1 Mf tweeter- cap.
Regards
Robert Bastani
I can confirm the side wall distance that Robert talks about will make a difference in the lower regions with the baffles. I have experimented with different things and placing it next to the sidewall changed the speaker , in my case for the better. I suppose this is just the nature of a non boxed driver.I wonder if anyone has experimented with a psuedo side wall like panel attachment, possibly to both sides just behind the baffle. Could this also raise the 200 to 400 hz region for those like myself that do not have the ideal room?
By the way the speakers for the most part sound great two months in now. Though many cd's are poor quality and it lets you know it as well as the digital sound in general. Though I would rather much have these than another pair I owned a couple of years ago that were the opposite and everything was non-resolved and sounded so non-lifelike.
Hi,Prometheus allows to fill a gap in this frequency- region by the help of the woofers when you have two plate- amps. Probably you don`t get a fully flat in room- amplitude in your room but small gaps won`t affect the soundquality a lot. Common boxed designs also doesn`t offer a flat in- room response and when they are passive you have not much possibilities to tune them to a better behaviour - Prometheus leaves you a wide range of possibilities from playing around with the woofer cut- off and volume to separate placement of baffles and woofers, very easy and also easy reversible.
The speakers in general are very important because there are huge differencies in concepts, sound- aesthetics, in- room behaviour and interaction with the electronics. The electronics and cable- differencies are more subtle but also very important to get 100% out of your stereo- system. When you played around with the speakers for a while and love how they sound i suspect that the best way to go on in soundquality is to optimize the electronics and cables because Prometheus let you hear this differencies much more than most other speakers. I offer perfect matching diy- cables in a moderate price- range and i know Bill Allen offers perfect matching electronics. When you contact him i am shure Bill can arrange a possibility for you to try these items at home.Regards
Robert Bastani
I have with some interest, followed the comments made concerning break-in and what electronics work well with the Bastanis open baffle speakers. I guess its about time I chime in on this subject.
Concerning break-in I have two different successful solutions: Time and Money.1.)TIME, Put them in a closet, place them face to face, wire them out of phase, cover them with a heavy blanket and let them play for 400 hours.(16 days at 24 hours/day) Next, spend endless hours trying all the parts on hand using your experiance to see what you can cook up. Milage may vary!
2.)MONEY, Purchase a known balanced set of components/cabling/source and listen to them from day one. (I suggest: TVC's/SET Amps/Bastanis Cabling and the finest source you can afford) Assemble a balanced system from the start and it just keeps sounding better right through the break-in! From there you tweak to taste.
If I may use offer an analogy; owning Bastanis Open Baffle Loudspeakers are much akin to building a good race car. One does not simply go down to the Joe's Race Car Dealership and purchase a top performing machine. A race car and team is developed over a period of time with a single purpose in mind. There are many "levels" of racing and nobody starts at the top. The nice thing about the Bastanis Prometheus is you start out with a chassis that will allow you to compete in all leagues. Its just a matter of time, experience, and money that dictate when and what class you race in. If fuel is the music and the race coarse is in your mind. With a finely tuned engine, transmission, and proper wiring you have the formula to be a winner on any track.
The large majority of people I deal with buy production vehicles from a dealership and have no experience owning or operating a race car. This level of sport is not for everyone! It requires your full commitment and dedication from the very beginning. It's highly likely that everything you own "is not" up to the task and will have to be replaced. That is not to say you have to spend lots of money just to leave that BMW eating dust. On the contrary with a little elbow grease, a few grand, you're out there on the race track not putsing around on the public roads. The real reward is your hard spent time and money always pays off in top performance using Bastanis Speakers. No Compromise's is our motto!
Keeping "everything" perfectly balanced is the key to success "at any level" using Bastanis (100db/1 watt) open baffles speakers.
Robert, Tony, and I, and the good people of this forum, are here to assist anyone willing to enter this exciting niche of the audio hobby.
Do you really mean 5-10db more at the 3 sets of frequencies? No speaker is flat but if I had 5-10db more from 8kHz to 18kHz I'd have blood pouring from my ears when I listen at high levels. (alright maybe not but 5-10db?)
This is what I'm talking about:http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/bastanis/messages/551.html
I don't have the parallel cap Robert suggests, and I should (my bad.) I'll try it pronto.
OK, I see where your 5 to 10db came from.For sure the setup of my Proms is different.
1) I have the widebands 1.3 meters from the back wall - this must give a very different frequency response.2) I have the subs in the rear corners - I did originally find I was missing the very deepest bass for sometime compared to REL Storm that go down to 18/20Hz. With careful tuning and mainly very extended run-in time I've got most of the deep bass back.
3) I run the tweeters run as dipoles - this seems to release extra treble energy and "air".
When I had a few hundred hour on the speakers I was still messing around with the bass settings. I now realise it was still changing considerably. After a year (!) I now have stability. I should add that I travel a lot with work so maybe I'm only up to 1,000 or 1,500 hours or so.
I had a problem with my phono stage at one point, I added 0.22uF to the xover cap, it brought the treble up a lot. Now that I've fixed the phono stage I'm back to 1.01uF. If your room is causing a treble roll-off then it seems reasonable to increase the xover cap. 0.22uF might be too much so be ready with a smaller cap.
Things are broken in at this point. I recently tried feeding signal to the subs off the amp terminals instead of the preamp, based on the 6Moons thread, to see if it would fill the midrange dip any. When I set the analyzer up and ran the new response up against my stored scan for the previous setup taken several months ago, they tracked exactly.Robert has suggested the midrange dip is from sidewall reflections cancelling out wavelenghts from the wideband unit. I measure the same roll-off no matter where I put the wideband unit in the room, and regardless of whether I'm using one or two widebands in the test.
Hi,when you can measure the same behaviour doesn`t matter where the speakers are placed something is wrong. Prometheus doesn`t show this behaviour to my measurements and also to the independent measurements of the German Klang & Ton diy- magazine from the review of the MKI (same widebands) in the issue 6/2002 (you can find the graph on my website under "press").
Do you get the same results when you measure the drivers nearfield (microfone very close to the cone)? Is there an imbalance in this frequency- range audible?
When you measure the same behaviour nearfield and you have the feeling that male voices or instruments like Cello are fine it is also possible that there is a failure in the measuring setup.Regards
Robert Bastani
I Second the response...I've had my MK II AirForce about 18 months (300B's too)and I couldn't agree more. They were a torture to break in (the limited edition AirForce tweeters) but I still feel they get better every time I let them play for 4-6 hours at a time. They sound great on everything I've listened to. Female vocals are to die for. The few classical compositions I've played are vast and open. The instruments are incredibly realistic. The dynamics are frightening...well frightening may be a BAD word...but they can make you jump at times. I've never played so much "air guitar" with another pair of speakers.
Regardless of the time for break-in...the Prometheus are worth it. And Robert and my buddy Bill Allen fo Bauls Audio are the greatest to work with.
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