u/sk9592
sk9592
sk9592
You might spend your time doing other things like watch tv, play games, listen to music, etc., but you are not earning any money there also
Man, that is literally my point. There's no way you actually think I'm saying you should spend every waking second of your life working when I say "your time has value".
Your time has value, full stop. It is literally the most valuable thing you have in this life. Spending a weekend building a subwoofer if you hate building subwoofers is a waste of your life. That time is better spent gaming or spending time with family or playing sports or whatever other hobby you want to do in your free time. Whether or not you are literally spending those hours earning money is completely meaningless to this cost benefit tradeoff.
sk9592
You have two parts to this question:
Whether it will "outperform"
At half the cost
How are you determining cost? Just cost of the driver, amp, and MDF? Are you counting the cost of tools, paint, wiring, stuffing, etc? Are you counting the cost of your time?
DIY is only cheaper if you account $0 for your time and you actually like to do these projects. If you are just doing this project in order to save money, that automatically means you are losing money. Your time costs way more than any money you save. DIY only makes financial sense if it is a hobby you enjoy.
As far as performance goes, the Behringer NX3000D only really supplies about 450-500W of clean power per channel. Even less down at 20Hz. So it's in the same neighborhood as the SVS and Klipsch amp. Not drastically more powerful like the spec page might imply. Unless you bridge it. Then it can do ~1600W into 4 ohms.
The Ultimax driver is a very capable driver for the price. But you need to put it in a cabinet that is properly designed for it. As long as you don't mind, then a properly designed cabinet tuned to 20Hz for the Ultimax driver will be larger than either of those other subs you mentioned. It will be closer in size to a SVS PB-3000.
Finally, you might not intend to ever sell or upgrade. But if you do, keep in mind that Klipsch and especially SVS has actual value in the resale market. Your DIY subwoofer is mostly worthless on the secondary market. You get pennies on the dollar for DIY speaker/sub builds. If you find a buyer at all.
sk9592
If you want to build a pair of 2-way active bookshelf speakers, Dayton sells a 4-channel DSP amp board you can use for exactly this use case:
Their 100W/ch version doesn't cost too much more, but is physically larger and has a fan. This 30W/ch version would have plenty of power for near and medium field usage.
sk9592
He will do a single box that mixes 502 and 252 modules. Those are all single board modules. But he will not do a single box that mixes Purifi/hypex ncx500 modules with 252/502 modules.
The higher end Purifi/hypex ncx500 modules are not single board. The power supply is a separate section than the amp board. He’s not interested is mixing these types of modules with the consolidated 252/502 modules.
sk9592
John Atkinson retired earlier this year as well. He and Butterworth were pretty much the last of that generation of audio reviewers who were still alive and working. The two of them really pioneered independent third party measurements of audio gear.
I'm guessing Brent will continue doing the Audio Unleashed podcast though. That's his personal hobby project with Dennis Burger.
sk9592
The Monolith in-wall used to be really incredible for the price back when they were constantly on sale for $300 a piece and actually possible to buy. They are now back to $500-700 and have not been available to buy for over a year. They effectively don't exist anymore.
At the budget end of things, RSL in-wall and in-ceiling speaker are the way to go.
If you're able to spend a bit more than that, then Revel's midrange in-walls are really solid performers for the price. And you can get new units for a decent price on eBay.
$400 for the Revel W553L is basically the next step up where I personally feel that the performance is enough better than RSL to justify the price increase.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/227302521710?
But if this is only for surround usage then the RSL is going to be plenty good enough for most budget and midrange home theater setups.
sk9592
The Denon X3900H is really excellent. Especially for the price compared to "hi-fi gear".
The RCA pre-outs on it are extremely clear. I would connect those to a Hypex NCx500 stereo amp (or Purifi) from Buckeye:
https://www.buckeyeamp.com/shop/amplifiers/hypex/ncx500/2_channel
At that point, you are effectively at the end game in terms of meaningfully making your electronics end better. The room for improvement at that point would be better speakers and subs, placement, room treatment, etc.
sk9592
He won't put those in a single box. I've asked before. I had wanted a single 7-channel amplifier from him with three NCX500 and two NC252s. He said the design would be impractically expensive, and to just buy the two amps separately.
sk9592
Adding to this, there is really no reason to have that many Purifi amp channels in your set up.
You can use Purifi or Hypex NCx500 modules for your LCRs. And maybe even your front wides if you really want to go extra. But it's a complete waste to use something that high end for your surrounds and overheads. Cheaper Hypex and IcePower modules will be more than good enough for those.
sk9592
I'd definitely seen it mentioned on Audioholics, but to be honest, I really do not feel like scrolling through 3 year old videos now to find the 10 second snippet where it was mentioned. People discuss it on various forums though.
I did a quick Google search and found it mentioned in this article:
https://novial.sk/documents-marantz/marantz-av10-and-amp10-australian-hifi-2023.pdf
It is definitely not Purifi like the Model 10. You simply would not be able to fit that many Purifi modules in a single chassis like that.
One of the benefits of amp designs based on the ICEpower 400A2 is how compact and dense they can be. That's how you can end up with 16 channel amps that can fit in a single rack mountable chassis like the Marantz Amp 10 or Trinnov Amplitude 16.
Interestingly, the Trinnov Amplitude 8 (and 8m) uses physically larger Hypex designs because there's fewer channels and they had more space to work with.
sk9592
It was mentioned everywhere when it was first released a few years ago. Marantz did interviews with Audioholics where they talked about it. And Gary Dayton from Marantz confirmed it as well in a few different interviews with What Hi-Fi and other publications.
Marantz says it's a semi-custom design. Which is probably technically true, but based on bench tests and tear downs third party sources have done, this semi-custom design is pretty similar in capability to the ICEpower 400A2.
sk9592
To be clear, it's not worse in any meaningfully audible way. But the Hypex module provides a bit more power before running off a distortion cliff and it has a bit lower noise floor in its optimal range than the ICEPower modules that Marantz is using.
But again, this is splitting hairs. It would take some sort of absurd edge case to both somehow notice a difference between these two but also not be an extreme enough scenario that you're not just frying both modules.
sk9592
Sweet! Yes, you have it positioned perfectly here
sk9592
If you ignore price, then the Hypex modules in the buckeye are better than the ICEpower ones in the Marantz. Not that the ICEpower modules are bad. But if you want to split hairs then there you go.
And if you consider price, then the Buckeye is cheaper. By a lot. But the Marantz does look much nicer, and some people will want the simplicity of a single box. But when we are talking about 16 channels, I personally consider a single box to be a con, not a pro.
sk9592
You can look for used KEF Q100s or Q150s in your local used market. They came in white as well. And set up notifications on HiFi Shark as well so that you're alerted when someone is selling them used near you.
sk9592
Not really the right subreddit for headphones or wireless audio questions.
But in your case, the answer seems pretty clear. If you prefer the Apple ecosystem anyway, then Apple Airpods paired to an Apple TV works fantastically for what you're looking to do.
sk9592
Considering you're dropping tens of thousands of dollars here and clearly want to go Perlisten, I would strongly recommend going with their R-series for the LCRs, even if you go A-series for all the other speakers here.
It only costs $1000 more for two R5M and a R5C center channel. And they are substantially better than the A-series. Sure, you're not getting towers. But you should be bass managing and crossing over to subwoofers.
So you can either pay a tad more to upgrade your most important 3 speakers to the next level. Or you can get towers just to have the warm fuzzy feeling that you have towers.
sk9592
Yes, it is possible you heard a difference.
No, it has nothing to do with one codec being "better" than the other. They are both lossless codecs that are capable of the same level of performance if all other variables are the same. Which they rarely are.
The two most likely scenarios for why you heard a difference:
They are nearly identical mixes, but one track was simply encoded a couple dB louder than the other. It doesn't take that much. Often times, with identical audio, all it takes is an additional 1.0-1.5dB of additional SPL for the vast majority of the population to feel that one track sounds "better" than the other.
They are genuinely different mixes. That happens quite often and having a different mix is an entirely different issue than having a different codec. There's plenty of examples of people putting the DTS mix from a 1080p Blu-ray and Dolby mix from a UHD Blu-ray through a spectrum analyzer and seeing that the older mix has more LFE and dynamic range baked into it. Some prominent examples include Master and Commander or the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The audio on the UHD disc for both of those was neutered compared to the 1080p release from years prior.
sk9592
Yes. It can work as a vertical center channel behind an acoustics transparent screen or as a vertical center channel below your screen/TV. Just be aware that if you use it as a horizontal center channel, that the acoustic center of this speaker is the Uni-q driver, not the physical center of this speaker. So if you positioning it below the screen correctly, it will aesthetically look off center.
sk9592
Both Dylan (owner of Buckeye) and Bruno Putzeys (the engineer who designed these Hypex and Purifi modules) recommend using an actual RCA to XLR cable, and specifically say do not use an adaptor.
There is a technical reason behind this. I won't pretend to know what that is. But when the designer of the amplifier tech and the builder of the amp are both saying this, I'm willing to follow their advice over random people online.
sk9592
Timbre matching between different brands and series of speakers is much easier when you are trying to match different speakers that all have a more or less neutral tonality.
I would have characterized the old SVS Ultra series of speakers as neutral tonality. Not so much the new Ultra Evolution speakers.
Anyways, if you're asking me what my favorite on-wall center channel is, that would be the Arendal 1961 Center. It is less than 6" deep when mounted to the wall. And when crossed over to subwoofers, it can get impressively loud for its size while maintaining low amounts of distortion. Not as loud as the Ultra Evolution Pinnacle towers. But that's simply not going to happen with a slim on-wall. And you will def want to cross it over to subwoofers around 90-100Hz.
https://arendalsound.com/product/1961-center/
And while it is a horizontal MTM speaker, it does not have the egregious off-axis lobing that many people complain about with other MTMs. It has pretty good horizontal dispersion out to around ±30 degrees. This is due to its waveguide design, driver spacing, and very low crossover point between the tweeter and woofers.
If you have a higher budget and want a more premium option, then the Perlisten X5W is slimmer, capable of higher output, and is a better speaker overall.
https://www.perlistenaudio.com/products/x5w/
https://fidelityimports.com/products/perlisten-audio-x5iw-on-wall-speaker
sk9592
Partially, yes. Paradigm uses coaxial drivers in certain models of their Founder series and Premier V2 series of speakers. Mostly their center channel speakers. They still use conventional drivers in most of their bookshelf and tower speakers.
However, not all coaxial drivers are the same and having a coaxial driver does not automatically mean the speaker is good. There are plenty of excellent speakers that use other types of drivers, and frankly, there are more bad coaxial drivers out there than good ones.
KEF is generally pretty consistently decent at designing coaxial drivers. They've been doing it for a very long time and it is almost exclusively what they do. (Their speakers can have limitations in some other ways). However, the first generation of coaxial drivers I've seen Paradigm release have not been that impressive. Either subjectively (IMO) or objectively (based on the measurements).
That is not to say you shouldn't get Paradigm speakers. I think most of their line up is fantastic. I just don't think that certain coaxial models from them such as the Founder 70LCR is particularly impressive. I would be more inclined to get one of their non-coaxial models actually.
sk9592
The Paradigm Studio 100 V4 and V5 were some of the best midrange speakers that Paradigm ever produced. IMO, they are better than the Prestige series that replaced them, and the Founders series which replaced those.
sk9592
Ultimately, it's probably going to depend on the person's room and their speakers. With certain people's rooms and setups, you really shouldn't be doing the full range correction that MJC does. (Though you can use MJC and still curtain off corrections)
Only correcting for room modes in the bass region and properly time/phase aligning your speakers and subs is the safer approach that will work on pretty much any system in any situation.
Yes, given you do all of that, a DIY subwoofer with the 12" Ultimax, the NX3000D, and a properly designed enclosure will beat out the SVS PB-2000 Pro in clean output by several dB.
It will probably not extend significantly deeper though. I really would not recommend using a port tune much deeper than 19-20Hz with this driver. And you will want to use the DSP to filter out any infrasonics and protect the driver. It probably could extend down to 17-18Hz after accounting for room gain (depending on the room).