Hello,
@troye!
You would please accept my hearty appreciations for your kind and encouraging words and comments.
- Do you feel the large physical VU meters change the psychological listening experience compared to software meters?
Well, Yes and/or No, depending on our music and/or reference tracks listening occasions, as you may easily guess. As you can find in bottom portion of
my lengthy post #535, I can physically move the 12-VU-Meter Array to any position/place in my listening room.
The usual reserved position of 12-VU-Meter Array, however, is on the top of the audio gear cabinet which is on left-hand side from my listening sofa; the 12-VU-Meter Array, therefore, is usually out of my view while I listen to the music/speakers (they are 3.3 m away) in front of my eyes/head. Whenever needed, I slightly left-turn my head to “see” the dancing VU-Meter Array; yes, I very much like viewing the dancing VU meters while I deeply and intensively enjoy listening to music tracks! Consequently, the VU-Meter Array never disturbs/bothers my daily music listening experiences.
Compared to software quasi-(sham-)VU and/or peak-power meters, I really prefer adding the real physical large-glass-face VU meters which are fully compatible with IEC 60268-17 VU meter specification/standard, especially the ballistic movement specifications (ref.
#545).
- When tuning the relative VU gain against actual room SPL, were you aiming more for engineering accuracy, or for a kind of “human emotional realism”?
As I wrote in detail in
my lengthy post #535, I have little interest on “absolute dB physical gain” at my listening position, but I am interested in relative audio signal powers of amplifiers going into each of the SP drivers, and hence the gains of the 12-VU-Meter Array are tuned for a kind of
“human emotional realism” which is your nice wording.
I wrote in
my post #535, as follows;
- The relative gains among the 12 VU meters should match the air sound pressure (gains) at my listening position.
- At the moment of the maximum (the loudest) actual room air sound pressure/volume (of course still below the system's clipping level) of full huge orchestra fff (sfz) tutti as well as of huge pipe organ's fff (sfz) tutti in my listening room environments, the VU-01(R) and VU-02(L), as well as VU-05(L) and VU-06(R) shall/should swing-up to around +2.8 dB red zone position.
Furthermore, from time to time, I use well QC-ed flat white and/or pink noise signals for relative identical gain matching among the all 12 (twelve) VU meters after fixing gains of VU-05(L) and VU-06(R) for woofers as described above.
- Which part of the system gives you the strongest sense of “life” — the NS-1000 midrange, the active crossover architecture, or the visual/mechanical interaction of the meters themselves?
I love all/whole combinations of my setup, and the sound played by them!
If you still would expect my more specific responses....
Yes, the YAMAHA JA-0801 vapor-deposited Beryllium midrange dome driver covering wide
ca.400 Hz to
ca.7.5 kHz (XOs are at 500 Hz/2nd-order Linkwitz-Riley and at 6 kHz/2nd-order Linkwitz-Riley) is still always my great satisfaction, as you kindly pointed. Within ASR Forum, I several times referred to JA-0801 by saying “still one of the a few best World Heritage midrange dome drivers.
The large and heavy L&R subwoofers, YAMAHA YST-SW1000, are still one of the best subwoofers ever produced, I believe. It can easily go down to 16 Hz zone with little distortion, really amazing. You would please ”search” within ASR Forum by “YST-SW1000” to find my many posts describing about it.
The L&R super-tweeters, FOSTEX T925A, are also “highlights” in my system, especially in its very unique physical positioning with revers-reflective wide 3D dispersion using heavy random-face crystalline cut-glass bowl.
Please let me emphasize again, however, that the optimization of total combination/integration of all the audio gears/tunings and room acoustics would greatly contribute to the amazingly wonderful music listening enjoyments.
- Have you ever experimented with warm incandescent lighting vs LED color temperature and its effect on perceived listening atmosphere?
This is very nice and expected inquiry for me, indeed!
When I originally designed my house, and then we implemented total renovation of our house/rooms, we (my wife and myself) have been always being very much careful and concerning about “lightings”, especially the “controllable color temperature”, “variable brightness”, and even “Color Rendering Index, CRI).
Almost all of our LED ceiling lights, wall-attached lights, spot-type lights, have “controllable (
ca.1900 K to 7500 K) color temperature” functionality, and in our dining room and living/listening room, we usually prefer 2700 – 2800 K lighting color temperature, as you can guess for relaxing atmosphere.
For our kitchen desktop and gas stoves/cookers, however, we prefer mixing of 2800 K ceiling lights plus rather bright 6000 K spot lights, though.
In our living/listening room, I usually set the ceiling lights and wall lights in 2750 K color temperature, having wide-range brightness control. I carefully selected all the lighting sources having color rendering index CRI higher than 90.
Now, you can easily understand why I carefully selected 2700 K LEDs for my 12-VU-Meter Array which are the best fit with our room lighting in 2750 K color temperature and variable brightness.
By the way, for the details of my latest audio setup, you would please visit my posts
#931,
#1,009 and
#1,022. And, you can find the Hyperlink Index for my project thread
here and
here.
You can find the Setup advice for Windows here, next step is to use UBUNTU Studio and later RPI5:
