Experimenting with 4 RTi38's

Terrax

Just cause I'm in between things tonight, and alittle bored, I plan to experiment with stacking 4 38's, 2 per side on my Yamaha RX-V870 in parallel, to see how coupling 4 like speakers inverted will sound compared to my 150's set standard for imaging and sound stage, not an actual comparsion of speaker vs. speaker. I'm sure I'll be at it all night, if I like what I hear, I'll report back. Unless you guy's don't want to hear, if that is the case, I'll digress.

VR3

This will be interesting....

So your doing a Stacked RTi38 pair vs. RTi150? This will be good. Hopefully the 38 just smokes it! I'm looking forward to hearing your results!

Forget it, I'm glad your trying it.

faster100

2 38's stacked will be similar to the rti70 with an axtra tweet.. you can't go into a demo hopeing it beats another speaker IMO, you have to go hopeing it sounds as good or better then what you like, far as it beating the 150 sid, give it a chance.. you never had one in-house to knock it as much as you do, IMHO so far they sound really really good and alot different then what some of the guys state here on the board, just supporting the fact that its in the eye of the beholder what sounds best..

back on track, Good luck with the stack..

VR3

My room, I couldn't even fit the RTi150 in here...it would go from wall to bed....

bigsexy1

Sid, you do realize that the 150s are no wider and not really all that much taller than the 70s, don't you?

VR3

Yep! But my oh my, arnt they deeper??????

Terrax

Hey guys,

I was up very late till the wee hours of the morn, working on this, tweaking placement, listening, tweaking some more, listening, and here is just a tiny little bit of my observations so far, bare in mind, they are still hooked up and I will be doing more tonight as well. 1) Placement is critical to soundstage and imaging, as I'm sure everyone here knows, too far apart, too close together, toed in, toed in farther, and so on. With that in mind, that was where I started after hooking everything up, this was done in my living room, and separate from all my other components. 2) listening was done only with music, not movies, as I feel music has more nuance's to offer for two channel media than movies would. I have listened to Enigma all of their first U.S. released CD's, Mazzy Star, Tool, Chemical Brothers in the first session. 3) Every other nosie making device in the house was cut off during listening. Ok, here is my first impression, TOO COOL!..... but after about an hour, I'm started to recognize a few weakness's.

Firstly, I what stood out most was that with the top pair of 38's stacked inverted on the bottom 38's where as the tweets are close together, it created a very narrow disperssion of high's, narrowed to about 3 inch's in height within 6 inch's between both the tweets from the front of the stacks to about 12 inch's in height 4 feet away from the speakers on axis. If I raise my head above the limit the highs would fade out, if I lowered my head below the limit, again the highs faded out and I was only left with a concentration of mids freq.

So, upon noticing this, I restacked the top pair with the tweets to the top, matching the bottom pair, this improved the the off axis response dramatically. But, this is as far as I have gotten so far.

In respect to my over all impressions of this setup, yes, soundstage does get bumped up some, it opened up a more airey presence, as well as lending a more defining localization of where instrument's being played seemed to move around the stage, adding a certain depth to the over all picture mentally.
Rain dropping in Enigma's 5th track on the their first cd sounded as if it were dropping all around me in a 360 degree area, which was pretty impressive, as I have used this cd to demo speakers for around 10 years, and only the high end of the spectrum is able to achive this level of dimension.

I plan to add more time to this experiment, if you guys approve of my writing, I will post back more. But, as I said before, if this is of no interest to anyone, I won't waste mine or your time with it.

BTW, this was posted from work and not home, so I am relying on memory, the memory of a 40 year old.... LOL

VR3

Keep me posted, im interested.....

Terrax

Sid, Btw,

So your doing a Stacked RTi38 pair vs. RTi150? This will be good. Hopefully the 38 just smokes it! I'm looking forward to hearing your results!

Nah, It is not a direct comparison of the Stacked 38's against the 150's, the 150's were merely used to set a standard for imaging and sound stage, since they have so close a relation in type's of Tweets and Mid driver's.

Terry

VR3

Terry,
Read my other thread "Stacked! Wow!" -- I commented on there. I hope you end up liking the stacked combo in the end though.