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Earlier this week “Dawnrazor” mentioned a speaker arrangement that piqued my curiosity. So, I moved my MMGs well out into the room and aimed them at each other. It seems like a weird idea – listening to speakers 90 degrees off axis! I expected that the treble would suffer greatly and imaging would be very different.I was surprised to hear that the change in tonal balance was more a thinning of midrange. There was plenty of treble with this arrangement. Imaging was very different – no real specificity of position. Sounds just seemed to be everywhere, but with some general L/R emphasis. My MMGs have never beamed less. It’s very different and not at all what I expected to hear.
If I moved too close, I started getting that “stereo in the head” imaging like headphones provide, but at a proper distance it sounded interesting. If you want to try something different, this certainly qualifies.
Follow Ups:
Yes, this is close to what I am hearing too.I never heard the thinning of the midrange, but your description of the imaging does seem to match mine.
It is definately less audiophile, but IMHO it does sound more like a live performance, which to my ears never has a precise speaker like image.
A couple of things. Were the tweeters closest to you? Also, if listening to the backs of the speaker did you reverse polarity on both your speaker cables? Both of these may have something to do with the midrange thinning you noticed. Or, it could have something to do with Tazs mod I am using. According to Neos great spread sheet, when I put in the values I am using, there is a slight midrange hump from 600hz to 1000hz, so it is possible that I might not notice such a thing, or like the sideways arrangement better because of this.
Finally, I found that in this setup, one had to seperate the speakers further than normal (mine are about 7ft apart with me listening 3ft back from the center line).
For me in the old room, this setup was a way to get the mags in a small room (10x11) and since they were close to the side wall, I could put them 5ft out in to the room, but they never seemed more than a ft out into the room.
Thanks for at least affirming that I am not totally crazy!!!
The concept seemed a bit nutty to me which is one of the reasons that I *had* to try it. Idiot that I am, I forgot about your mentioning having them back to back - could have separated them a couple of feet more that way.They were spaced five feet apart (limited by cable length) with the tweeters on the near side, and being seated about two to three feet away yielded the best effect. It's definitely a near-field arrangement, but the one that actually sounds the best in the near field (if that makes any sense).
On an unrelated topic, how does PG get that little album cover to display as his signature line? I tried something on my last post but it didn't work.
You're starting trouble, didn't you know you're not supposed to feed the wackos? :^ )Just a joke Dawnrazor! That's a nice, non threatening ID you have there by the way....... um... razors at dawn... are you a barber?
:^ )
I don't add the avatar below after every post. When you sign up it asks you what you want your signature to be I believe, and you have to enter it then. There must be a way to change it but I don't know how. Ask Mart. (out of curiosity what do you have in mind? The only use I know of for the word wazoo is "out the...". You're not going to use a pic of that are you? :^ )
Click here.Log in
If the next page does not have your ID, and the words profile/logout at the top right, hit the back button. It will probably be on that page. Click profile, then Manage/Change Account Information
At the bottom of that form you can enter the URL of your wazoo.
I found the big wazoo
wazoo web
But my favorite is the grand wazoo. I think you'll get enormous amounts of respect with this one. I even thought of a tag line...
You did WHAT with my stereo?
It's great and so is your tagline, but I already had something in mind. Like the first one, it is the "Grand Wazoo" - one of my favorite albums (except for a couple of songs...okay, let me just say that Blessed Relief (the last cut) is one of my favorite Zappa tracks - nice jazz). This is the album he produced while in a wheel chair after being knocked off stage (into an orchestra pit) by a crazy British chap.
Hey PG...this is a funny post."Razors at dawn"
Very astitute PG, I think people just think I am a chick.
I have been known to cut my own hair, but usually right before I have to go somewhere. Usually not the morning though. I guess I could start.
Thanks to Wazoo, I guess old Dawnrazor is not so crazy after all...reptisand and all :^)
This may shed more light on things more than I should, but here you go if I was cool like you and had a picture it would be the one in this link:
Cool. If you have a room with a window on the wall in front of your listening chair (frontwall) then try opening it as much as you can. In my old setup, this resulted in a huge realistic soundstage.I think too that wat is behind the speakers, on the side wall also effects the sound. When I did it in the old room, I had a bookcase directly between the maggies and the wall they were facing, and maybe that took away some of the treble, so if there was a midrange dip, It didn't matter.
Are they firing in to an untreated wall?
Anyhow, I hate to give a way PGs secrets, but something tells me he wouldn't mind too much:
That arrangement doesn't work for my application; I was just curious about how it would sound. I confess to being amazed at what I discovered. For near field listening that configuration is very good indeed.Hmmm, I think I need to shrink the graphic just a tad. It does "jazz" things up a bit though.
Sorry to keep beating this dead horse, but this midrange thinning has got me thinking.I forgot to mention tha the speakers were vertical (sorry PG). I am assuming that when you listened, they werent???
I have n't tried it tilted, it would be interesting to see how that sounds.
I'm the lunatic that has his MMGs mounted on mono-pole stands. People are certain that they flex like mad, but they are incorrect on that assertion. In any case, they aren't permanent - they "belong" to another pair of speakers! As I was completing their reconstruction (they started life as bases for industrial tables), I noticed that they would elevate my MMGs about 3" above my REL subwoofer.I'd like to integrate the two into a hybrid of sorts - I'll need a second one for the other MMG and cheap they aren't (and they're about as common as hen's teeth on the used market). After mounting them on those stands I started thinking about how I could brace them. That's when I cut the traingular braces out of plywood and screwed things together.
What's the point of this ramble? My MMGs are locked in an absolute vertical orientation - and they are held quite rigidly, I might add! At the outset, I just wanted to experiment with having them raised and then things just kept evolving. The stands pivot which allows me to experiment with various degrees of toe angle without having to lift the speakers off the floor - did I mention my MMGs have put on some weight?
Now I'm ready for the grand rebuild with nice materials - gulp. As I'm no woodworker, I can only hope to approximate the level of craftsmanship PG's work illustrates - man those things look fantastic! I don't know if he realizes that he's probably initiated a revolution - look for lots more Maggies wearing hardwood frames.
I owe him and a few others a debt in that they have steered me away from making a major mistake in the execution of my next step. There are many wonderful people who share their immense knowledge in these threads and they all deserve thanks. This is a wonderful resource.
Hmmm, now I think the image is too small. It's hard to see what's actually going on in that picture - there's a war being waged between two bands.
So much of this has to do with the complete difference between dipole and normal box speakers. Dipoles are just a whole different acoustical beast.I listen to my maggies with a significant amount of toe-OUT. Could never ever do that with my old Snell tpe D's, because I would instantly lose any solid center image. With the Maggies, the whole usual routines of speaker set up kinda have to be thrown out the window so you can start over learning what a "speaker" even is.
One would be well-pressed to construct a sentence with stronger truth value than that one. You ain't just wuffin'!Just for giggles, I decided to hear what regular box speakers sounded like in this configuration. I lugged a pair of AR91s out into the living room and placed them where I had the MMGs. I can sum up what I heard with a single word, "Yuck."
Toed out is another placement that would never have crossed my mind - just seems to violate a basic principal. If there's one thing, however, that this forum has taught me it is not to so sure about such things. Do have your tweeters to the inside in that configuration?
No, they are toed-out I would say, about 15-20 degrees, with tweeters on the outside. I also have the speakers firing across the diagonal of my room.I always dial in my speaker locations and set up using really good mono vocal recordings.
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