kezia
New member
Thought I'd post my current setup -- it's unusual!
I used to run Spendor SA1s with a sub for bass, and crossover in my Emotiva processor -- but all that got stolen in a break-in. I couldn't replace with what I wanted, so settled for some B&W PM1s from the forum, running from my leftover Emotiva UPA-200 power amp, which in turn was fed directly from a Dragonfly DAC (the 1.2 version I think) out of a Mac Mini, with iTunes and lossless rips.
This sounded fine, but not what I wanted in the bass department -- partly due to room acoustics, partly just the physics of a smaller speaker. Bass is good on the PM1s but it's going to be rolling off under 50-60hz quite quickly.
So I added a cheapie B&W ASW608 sub. (I like sealed-box rather than ported subs, and B&W does these + there are lots in SA and can be had for cheap.)
Now I needed a way of crossing over the sub. I don't hold with passive crossovers driven off the power amp -- wanted to cross over before feeding the power amp. This was a good opportunity to play with Roon, and I ended up buying a subscription, and moving to TIDAL for lossless streaming.
Now, I had Roon installed on the micro server, doing the crossover, and feeding two streams of audio to the Mac Mini with the Roon bridge endpoint -- one for the mains, which are high-passed, and one for the sub, low-passed. The sub is fed from the onboard analog out of the Mac, whereas the mains from the Dragonfly. The two output zones are grouped in Roon, and Roon's synchronisation under these circumstances does a good enough job for this case. I'm crossing over just under 80hz, and with the cheapie sub and the long wavelengths, any timing issues are inaudible to me.
Next step was to optimise.
I got a MiniDSP UMIK-1 (also from the forum) and played with REW, and ended up with a set of convolution filters to get to a target curve that got rid of some of the bass modes and also allowed me to get a much flatter response from the sub by boosting the sub gain and then cutting all except some of the troughs. I also tamed the slightly bright B&W sound a little with a very gentle Harman house curve slope.
End result sounds surprisingly good, for such a Heath Robinson setup.
I'd love to do this route again but with a high quality multichannel DAC -- still using Roon to do PEQ/convolution filters/crossover, but without the potential timing issues this setup has. But high quality multichannel DACs are expensive.
Any interest in this setup? I can post more detail and screenshots of the Roon setup if anyone's interested.
I used to run Spendor SA1s with a sub for bass, and crossover in my Emotiva processor -- but all that got stolen in a break-in. I couldn't replace with what I wanted, so settled for some B&W PM1s from the forum, running from my leftover Emotiva UPA-200 power amp, which in turn was fed directly from a Dragonfly DAC (the 1.2 version I think) out of a Mac Mini, with iTunes and lossless rips.
This sounded fine, but not what I wanted in the bass department -- partly due to room acoustics, partly just the physics of a smaller speaker. Bass is good on the PM1s but it's going to be rolling off under 50-60hz quite quickly.
So I added a cheapie B&W ASW608 sub. (I like sealed-box rather than ported subs, and B&W does these + there are lots in SA and can be had for cheap.)
Now I needed a way of crossing over the sub. I don't hold with passive crossovers driven off the power amp -- wanted to cross over before feeding the power amp. This was a good opportunity to play with Roon, and I ended up buying a subscription, and moving to TIDAL for lossless streaming.
Now, I had Roon installed on the micro server, doing the crossover, and feeding two streams of audio to the Mac Mini with the Roon bridge endpoint -- one for the mains, which are high-passed, and one for the sub, low-passed. The sub is fed from the onboard analog out of the Mac, whereas the mains from the Dragonfly. The two output zones are grouped in Roon, and Roon's synchronisation under these circumstances does a good enough job for this case. I'm crossing over just under 80hz, and with the cheapie sub and the long wavelengths, any timing issues are inaudible to me.
Next step was to optimise.
I got a MiniDSP UMIK-1 (also from the forum) and played with REW, and ended up with a set of convolution filters to get to a target curve that got rid of some of the bass modes and also allowed me to get a much flatter response from the sub by boosting the sub gain and then cutting all except some of the troughs. I also tamed the slightly bright B&W sound a little with a very gentle Harman house curve slope.
End result sounds surprisingly good, for such a Heath Robinson setup.
I'd love to do this route again but with a high quality multichannel DAC -- still using Roon to do PEQ/convolution filters/crossover, but without the potential timing issues this setup has. But high quality multichannel DACs are expensive.
Any interest in this setup? I can post more detail and screenshots of the Roon setup if anyone's interested.
