Shhhh. I'm happily munching on my foot Gavin.
111 report
I was at Jim's a couple of weeks ago and he gave me the go signal to shade his subwoofer towers now that the 111s are broken in. Most sub towers have single XO pt, phase and level controls for all drivers. The 111s have controls for the individual amps for each. This opens up quite a few possibilities. When all drivers are set with identical settings they act as a pulsating cylinder. By tapering the levels from the selected Sub Zero, in this case the bottom sub, from highest to lowest then tapering the crossover point the opposite way and ever so slightly slightly alter the perceived directionality one gets interesting results in 2xPi space (how the hell do I use special characters again? Arghhh). When shading the power response this way the towers are still acting like a cylinder but each driver now interacts a bit differently with the room boundaries IOW it loads the listening space's internal volume differently. The effect is that the Sub tower's load, sustains and particularly long decay tails made up of mostly long reverbs which in turn is mostly either simulated reverbs or actual reverb of the recording venues in the recordings become more distinct giving better portrayal of hall size. It seems to have also enhanced layering and depth of the preceding parts of the ARSD envelope (Attack, Release, Sustain, Decay) handled by the main towers which themselves go down to 20Hz but obviously at greater -dB. Bottom line....... oh baby, baby.
Next up will be to experimenting on shaping the sub arrays and see what that brings us. Shaping is done by applying delays to drivers to simulate curvature. This is done by simply tapering phase settings. Just waiting for a really tall mic stand for this one.
This is really fun stuff not because it is all new. These are practices that have been applied in sound reinforcement for as long as I can remember. In the domestic setting it is also analogous to the various multi-sub methodologies. It's not all just about even coverage or building up a foundation after all. It is in a large part being able to scale up the entirety of a sound event's complete envelope. Boy it's just really fun to be able to play with the possibilities.
