WOW Toby,
You are a prolific writer and you do it SOOOOO VERY WELL!!!!
That was a really great report!!!!
I think you are really onto a great plan.
I had to look up the specs on the amps you mentioned, and am impressed!!!!! When you get those XPA-1Ls I will really be interested in your report then. I hope you will try running them in Class A, just to try it out. I can imagine they might just sound really awesome with your Triton Ones.
Again, you really write well, I enjoy all your comments.
AND, I agree, one of these days, I hope you will be able to be happy with your system and spend more money on music and movies.
That is where it is after all!!!! Enjoy the tunes and shows,
God Bless,
Wayne

Thanks for the kind words, Wayne. It's going well so far. Once I have the 7 amplifier channels in place, I should be able to relax and enjoy it for a bit until the next wave of receivers come out with the DTS:X and higher HDMI standard. In the meantime, I can get working on the room. It's a bit utilitarian right now but it certainly allows me to focus on the picture and sound.

Cheers,

T Cobe

I spent a lot of time on the theater this past weekend. In an effort to tame room acoustics and soundproof my theater a bit, I insulated the ceiling with recycled denim insulation. I have also been unhappy with my center channel speaker stand, needed a place to put amplifiers, and wanted something that could accommodate a future upgrade to a SCXXL so I built a low profile av cabinet. To cap it off, I've ordered my first XPA-1L and will use it on my SCXL until I purchase the second amp and then they will move to support my T1s.

I've had boxy, bloated, and unnatural vocals in my room for a long time. No matter what settings I've used, I could not eliminate the problem. My theater is also just below the master bedroom and listening to music and movies has been disruptive when my better half has been trying to sleep. The bass from my T1s has also been causing a lot of rattles.

In an effort to address these issues, I've insulated my basement ceiling and it has made a HUGE difference. Vocals are now perfect: totally accurate with no bloat. The noise in the master bedroom has been diminished, though not gone and spirited listening at 0400 is still not on the approved activities list... Best of all has been the impact on bass. Things are much cleaner, tighter, and more controlled. It seems much harder to isolate where the bass is coming from and I believe I will have to turn down the gain dial on the T1s for stereo music as bass is a bit more prominent now.

With the acoustically transparent felt fabric on the ceiling and the insulation underneath combined with my previous room treatments, I feel like my room resembles a studio. The environment is very controlled. It almost felt too quiet at first and I have had to turn the volume up a bit and re-calibrate my front three channels. I had to boost each by about 1.5 dB to get back to the 75 dB calibration point. Imaging has improved as well as my noise floor seems much lower. I've read many times how important room acoustics are and not I hav first hand experience. I HIGHLY recommend spending some time and money on acoustics over chasing down better interconnects. You'll spend less money, get more results, and be better equipped to hear the subtle differences between different cables and settings.

I'll try to take pictures of my av shelving and XPA-1L tomorrow and get them posted. The shelving didn't make a difference in sound and it is quite utilitarian but I believe it is very functional. It looks a little empty right now...

Cheers,

T Cobe

Good morning forum members. Here's a couple of shots of the home made av cart. Plenty of room on the bottom shelves to play with for amps or a 2 channel set up. I figured this would allow me to place my mono block amps in close proximity to my T1s for now, allowing for better and shorter speaker cables. Later, I can use this space for a 2 channel set up and keep all of my cable runs short for critical listening. I will use something with home theater bypass and keep my cable runs for theater longer. There is also plenty of room for a 39" center channel speaker...

Cheers,

T Cobe

Hey T,
Looking great and I can see you are a Handy Man!!!!! You built that yourself? Good job!!!!
I hope you have a good security system at your house, don't want robbers to come and say, Look at all this great gear, and someone has already put it on a rolling cart for us!!!!
Just joking, fortunately for guys like us, people hardly ever rip off our kind of gear, they can't fence it for anything really, nobody knows from Bose. ha ha
Happy listening, and great job planning for growth and expansion of the dream.
You are Living Large Sir!!!!!
God Bless, Wayne

I recently added my second Emotiva XPA-1L. I am certainly not disappointed by the difference this addition has made to my 2-channel listening. It provided everything I was hoping it would. It has improved the bass, transparency, imaging, and size of the soundstage even more than the improvements previously seen by the XPA-5.

Even though the T1 has a built in amplifier for the bass below 100 Hz, it still seems to benefit from quality amplification. Experiments with crossover settings have shown with less powerful amplification, there are benefits to using the LFE input for reproduction of frequencies below 100Hz, even in stereo playback. Impedance measurements seem to support this hypothesis as well. I would equate this to a formula one race car. Even though the T1 is a well engineered high performance machine, it still requires a high octane fuel (amplifier power) to get the best performance.

The only downside to adding the second XPA-1L is that I have moved my SCXL back to the XPA-5 and the difference is extremely audible. The SCXL sounded much better on the monoblock amp! I will definitely need to add another amp just for the center channel even when I upgrade to the SCXXL.

The other significant change to the home theater this weekend was adding back my DSP-3400 Paradigm subwoofer. I placed it behind my primary listening position for better dispersion and it sounds incredible. I played a little with the orientation of the driver and when pointed directly into the couch, it was like adding bass shakers. It was pretty cool and definitely made the experience more immersive.

The bass isn't any "louder" with the additional sub but there seems to be more air movement. I picked up an AudioQuest splitter cable and have the Paradigm and one T1 connected to one SW output and my other T1 to the second SW output. I then calibrated both SW outputs to around 80 dB. Yes, this is still 5 dB hot, but this is where I had my T1s set previously. What surprised me was that I didn't have to adjust the output of the SW channel that had the T1 and outboard sub very much from where it was with just the T1. I was expecting a bigger drop off with the addition of a splitter.

To test things out briefly, I played a few scenes from Star Trek: Into Darkness and Godzilla 2014. Both movies provide phenomenal material for testing subwoofer performance. Playing these scenes provided the additional opportunity to adjust the subwoofer phase for maximum impact.

The results of this test have proven that additional LFE dispersion is worth the investment. Particularly in my large listening space. I will definitely consider a FF5 or SSXXL as a future upgrade. The Paradigm sounds good, but it is a little flabby sounding and way too big.

That's all for now. I definitely consider this an incremental improvement in my set up. I believe my next upgrade will be a dedicated 2-channel preamplifier to further improve my stereo listening and to get my monoblock amps right next to my T1s. I tried running some long RCAs but was not happy with the results. The length was too long when coming from the adjoining room and through the ceiling. While the music sounded good, I was getting some strange distortion during power on and off. Switching to shorter RCAs and longer speaker wires cleaned that up. Maybe another point for the great cable debate. Emotiva's customer service and tech support were great, BTW.

Off to the music store this morning to quench my thirst for some new music. Hopefully I can find a jazz or blues album or two that don't sound like they came from the 70s... I hope to post some more listening impressions later.

Cheers,

T Cobe