Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems TacT/DEQX room correction

Does anybody have experience with digital preamps from either of these companies?

My new living room features a vaulted ceiling and is essentially open to the whole house. The contemporary style dictates no drapes, few rugs, etc. -- in other words the walls, floors and ceilings are 98% hard surfaces. Room treatment panels are out save for a few Cathedral low frequency panels I've built in up high in the corners. These help a tad at best in what is a reflective, reverberant nightmare.

My ATC 20-2 actives driven by an Audio Aero DAC/preamp can and has sounded spectacular, but not here. I'll be adding a sub as the ATCs are overwhelmed by the volume and can lean toward lean in any case. Best idea I have, and I'm open, is one of the aforementioned full range room correction solutions.

Thoughts? Thanks.

Good luck. No one, including the purveyors of such devices, will commit to their success under such difficult conditions. It will certainly help and you should try but you can't make a silk purse from a ........

Kal

Loud and clear. I'm not expecting miracles, just trying to problem solve as best I can.

I use TacT in a number of systems. One of my rooms has two hard walls, which when you do the clap track test, you can hear the echoes ringing between them. The TacT was pretty effective at taming this ringing but didn't remove it completely. More effective was hanging some canvas paintings at the reflection points which removed the ringing completely.

In such a brutal room, acoustically speaking, there is going to be very little the TacT can do to help with reflections. You really should consider some form of dressing even if it's only at crucial spots like first reflections - curtains/tapestries/even canvas paintings (as I did) will help. Just need to soften up those hard reflection points... don't forget a rug on the floor as well...

What the TacT *will* do in a room such as this is allow you to control/remove room boom, which in itself could provide a large enough jump in sound quality to justify it, but the higher frequency reflections are still going to smear your soundstage.

Not sure what speakers you are using but I have issues with TacT and Meridian DSP speakers. I think the DSP in the speakers causes delay/masking issues with the high frequency measurement tone making it very difficult to get consistent results. I've approached both TacT and Meridian in an effort to resolve this but neither company was interested in investigating the issue. If fact, I see the same issue when using a Mark Levinson DAC - the TacT high frequency sample is only 1 bit and this seems to trip DACs up. Only consistent way around it is to bypass the DAC during measurement but clearly you cannot do this with Meridian DSP speakers.

Mark

I used a Tact TCS in a pretty harsh living room setup: speakers in cabinets above a built in TV, chairs up against a wall of bay windows, asymmetrical, etc. I also own an 861v4 (and prior to that an Audio Research Ref2 Mk2.) I'm currently using a DEQX.

In that setting the Tact made a huge difference. Muddied dialog snapped into place, surround effects snapped into place, and music was passable. Still, it was nowhere near the sound of my well configured dedicated music/theater room. It was not "plug and play", and it takes awhile to get the hang of the user interface and to set the various parameters appropriately for your particular room.

In my well configured well treated room I found the Tact more "subtractive" then an improvement and removed it from the system. It was different, but not better.

As an aside, I had pretty severe user interface issues with the Tact. I could not get it stable under Crestron control, despite paying big dollars to two different top notch Crestron programmers. I believe it was a bug in the communications hardware. This has likely been fixed in the last three years.

The DEQX is likely to be less useful in your setup. It's an amazing outboard crossover and parametric EQ, but it doesn't offer the same level of time and phase room correction as the Tact. Even in a great room the DEQX made a huge difference vs. the built in crossovers.

Even canvas paintings at first reflection points are going to be difficult - a) because these points are either windows or not really suited to paintings/treatment, or b) what I could fit is simply not acceptable to my wife. I get free run of the basement, not the living room. I realize something like the Tact is a band-aid -- IMO room treatment is far and away the most cost effective improvement you can make to your system. As an aside, I'm always shocked to walk into rooms with thousands of dollars worth of cables and no room treatment.

We do have a small rug now that will get larger and I'm going to see if I can get some small panels in a couple of places (primarily directly behind and to the side of the speakers), housed and colored in such a way that fits our decor approved by my wife. This company has some pretty interesting materials:

http://www.texaa.com/

I can cut/frame and tell my wife that we're going Mondrian! We'll see. The only chance I have is that my wife readily acknowledges that the system sounds poor now and used to sound great.

Sounds like the Tact might be worth a shot. I may try to find one on Audiogon, etc. -- if I can get a good price, it might be close to a free trial. How is it as a DAC, btw? Anyone heard the new Copland or Lyngdorf stuff such as:

http://www.lyngdorf.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=45

this is from the former Tact designer.

What issues did you have? I had none that I recall with my TCS2. And I do all my own Crestron programming which makes me an amateur in that field... though my background *was* programming.

Mark

People do like the TacT DACs, but acknowledge that there is definitely room for improvement. Personally I prefer my Levinson DAC and I know a bunch of TacT owners who use other DACs instead of the TacT DAC. The problem with the original TacT stuff, as far as I can see, was that they packed so much technology into the box that corners had to be cut. I believe improvements have been made in many areas in the newer Boz/Lyngdorf models. So, IMO, the original TacT units should be viewed as digital room-correction units only and if you want maximum performance you should look elsewhere for DACs.

Best advice, as always, is try for yourself...

Mark

If I go that route, I'll compare it to the Audio Aero DAC I have, which is excellent btw.

How about approaching the problem from a different angle? The low diffraction curved shape and relatively small baffle size of your ATCs ensure that they have very wide dispersion. Although they can sound fantastic in a traditional listening room arrangement, in your particular application this is not a good thing. I would imagine switching to a "controlled directivity" speaker design like a dipole or horn design which significantly reduces the ratio of reflected-vs-direct sound energy would be a real boon.

Traditional full-range flat panel dipoles like electrostats or Magnepans do tend to be quite large but at the same time, most offer a cool architectural look that might fit right in to your modern living space. The same could be said of some modern full range horn designs like the Avante Gards. In my personal experience, even the smaller hybrid panel/dynamic bass driver designs like those of Martin Logan could really improve the situation.

Other more traditionallooking suggestions that also appeal to our fetish for active loudspeaker designs are the Linkwitz Orion dynamic dipoles and the active version of the Gradient Revolution with it's cardoid radiation pattern.

Happy Trails!
Vince@freewheelcycle.com

Thanks Vince. I've thought about this and, in fact, considered the Gradients. I think their approach makes a lot of sense; some small Amphions I have recess the tweeter in a waveguide to minimize early reflections. Genelec does a similar thing -- seems the Finns are particularly concerned with controlled directivity. The Amphions are notably clean in the highs through the upper mids -- I think the waveguide contributes to this.

I want to try to make the ATCs work before looking elsewhere because they can be spectacular sounding, and I've gone to some trouble and expense to have them painted gloss white to fit in well w/our decor. Additionally, whatever alternative speaker I might end up with has to be wall-mountable - I had some custom platforms that work with omnimounts made for the ATCs to accomplish this. Having said all this, I've planted the notion with my wife that I might swap speakers down the road.

I never had great results with my Tact , both with my ATC scm 50'a's and my DSP speakers. Most likely cos I wasnt really prepared to invest the huge amount of time and fiddling to get it just right. Was always a mission , having to use a laptop and measuring and setting preference curves etc etc. When I got my TACT (2.0 with AD/DA boards) I thought it might be the magic bullet - it wasn't
I did however run the TACT as a DAC/Pre to my SCM50a's with correction bypassed and also wasnt that impressed , I had better results using various Pre's and stand alone DACs ,
I actually have had more success with my Z-sys RDP-1 digital parametric , albeit it does not do time correction the parametric ability is useful and it is as transparent as it comes.
If I think about it , Overall the effects I got with my TACT was to make big speakers sound small? (I still have it , tho its unused)

The only thing I can suggest in your setup , if you cannot do any room treatment is to listen nearfield and away from room boundaries , if that is possible , as it will remove a lot of the room from the music.
Do you have a spare room that you could perhaps use for your hifi , would most likely be a win win situation for both you and the wife?