Critique my system upgrade

[racerxnet]

That's worth a try, if only for the education. Still, the reason for putting the LS50s on top of the subs is to have each sub work in cooperation with its main. The sub under the left speaker plays the left channel; same for the sub on the right. I can see on the SHD output display that power on the two sub channels varies; they are not the same at any given time. And I can hear the difference. So I would rather find some other way to correct the low frequency nulls.

You could not differentiate the sub Left and Right output below 300 hz. There is no directionality to discern each channel. Case in point is my systems
woofer towers. Does the Left column sound different to the Right? I honestly cannot tell. I would have tried to move one of the towers to the back wall, but 30ft is a stretch with the servo cable being 8ft long. Play with the room sim and see what happens to the nulls.

 

[phoenixdogfan]

You could not differentiate the sub Left and Right output below 300 hz. There is no directionality to discern each channel. Case in point is my systems
woofer towers. Does the Left column sound different to the Right? I honestly cannot tell. I would have tried to move one of the towers to the back wall, but 30ft is a stretch with the servo cable being 8ft long. Play with the room sim and see what happens to the nulls.

View attachment 109943

Also I would not worry about messing up the phase by not having the sub and satellite outputs arrive simultaneously. Most of what I read leads me to believe that phase coherency, particularly in the bass is trivial if not inaudible. Even bass response in the room is far more important, which is why moving the subs around should be the first thing to try.

 

[YouCanCallMeGeorge]

You could not differentiate the sub Left and Right output below 300 hz. There is no directionality to discern each channel.

I can definitely tell where the sound is coming from, if the signal level out of one channel is significantly higher than the other. That happens regularly, and it means there is a certain amount of imaging even at low frequencies. I can hear the progression of the bow across the strings of the cello, down in its low range, for example.

 

[YouCanCallMeGeorge]

The system came alive this evening. I moved a piece of furniture from the side wall. And I moved the listening chair off to the side and rear, to avoid close reflections from chair to mike while I made a new set of measurements for Dirac. I accepted the default filter suggested by Dirac, only flattening the bass below 100 Hz. Finally, I turned the LS50s inward another 3 degrees (for 7 degrees total). Bingo! The world transformed from 2D to 3D. It's wonderful.

The funny thing is that the signal traces in Dirac and REW look very much as they did before. Moving the dresser from the side wall did not help with the null at ~70 Hz. Moving the chair away from the mike did not appreciably reduce the combing in the REW trace. Even so, I could tell right away that the sound was more open with the new Dirac measurements. I played around with the filter, finally settling on the default suggested by Dirac, just toning down the bass by 2 dB.

Along the way I verified that the combing is not in the mike or in the speakers; I got good looking traces with the mike six inches from the speaker plane. I also verified that the speakers are okay: distortion in a low volume sweep at two inches from the tweeter was 0.08% on the right; 0.1% on the left as I recall.

I may eventually find that I can make further improvements. For now, I'm going to enjoy what I have. Thanks for all your suggestions.