The present & the future...

[Reid Malenfant]

With the ever present possible threat of extermination from a certain Dalek i thought i'd better get some pics up of my present system & future components

First of all the whole system is in a state of flux, there are bits & pieces all over the place & not where they should be. I had some serious issues with some weird earth loops that totally messed up the firmware on a couple of DVD players with HDMI connected. I fact one player (Denon DVD 2910) will no longer output via HDMI or DVI Right now the AV components are sitting in front of the TV & i'm listening to mixed down stereo on a couple of Mission 780s...

To the HIFI.

First up here is my DIY rack, there are quite a few components so i had to make it 2 components wide. The whole thing is made from 18mm MDF apart from the shelves which are 15mm. I designed it so that every shelf is adjustable & nearly every component sits on it's own paving slab (suitably painted) & these are isolated from the shelf & rack via 12mm thick felt in each of the 4 corners. There are glass doors on the front of the rack & these have rather nice seals to prevent dust ingress. Unfortunately it doesn't work too well right now as i need to install some fine material (like speaker grille cloth) on a frame & cover the ventilation holes at the base of the rack. The door frames were made using secondary double glazing fittings available from DIY stores, i cut the glass to fit.

If you are wondering about the colour scheme it's painted this colour to match the walls


Notice there is a rather large hole near the base where a DVD player should be sitting Also another rather large hole where a Pioneer CTF950 cassette deck will be residing when i get things as i actually want them.

Here's the right hand side. Again this will all be taken apart as the HK AVR5500 will be removed along with the Classe DR5 & Extron video scaler & other bits will be going in instead



My pride & joy, the Krell DT10 transport. I picked it up off of fleabay just as the recession kicked i hard for about a 20th of the original new price Works beatifully & makes my previous transport (Theta Data Basic) sound like it was a midi system




Moving on to the modified Yamaha NS1000M speakers. Well i guess they really shouldn't be called that any more, the only common denominator is the crossover & original drivers. The 12" is now inside the main enclosure in a 4th order bandpass alignment, this covers from approximate 30 - 110Hz. The 12" is fed directly from one channel of a Musical Fidelity P150 at present. The other channel drives a 7" Audax which is connected to where the yam 12" would be on the Yam crossover & the other drivers in the usual positions.




The crossover is built into the stand & wired up to the speakers. I used some fairly heavy 6mm brass threaded rods to do the connections. The enclosures are 36mm thick & extensively braced & weight in at about 140lbs with the drivers. To keep the enclosure as narrow as possible the 12" was tilted to an angle approaching 45 degrees, it's accessable via a removable panel on the rear of the speaker.


I'll get some more stuff up a bit later, loads to do unfortunately

Bests to all, bye for now...

[Reid Malenfant]

Onwards...

Here is one of the electronic crossovers that splits below 110Hz to the 12" driver & above this to the P150 channel driving the original Yamaha crossover feeding the front mounted drivers. All home designed including the circuit & just for good measure it's even built on prototyping (vero) board



Notice the rather large heatsink The reasoning behind this was that eventually i was going to have a relay controlled volume control downstream of this crossover & i wanted it to be able to drive a very low resistance to minimise noise. The consequence of this is that it runs at quite a high current as it's single ended class A & the heatsink needed to be big to keep it reasonably cool.

Inside couple of shots..





I even went so far as to test a load of capacitors out on my LCR bridge to get tolerances below 0.5% for a dead accurate crossover. Operational amplifiers were used as an input buffer & these drive a differential amp which drives a mosfet on the output. The mosfets load is a transistor used as a constasnt current to get the single ended circuit. As the op amp is driving a transistor base it sees a very high impedance so it will itself stay in class A, all good news sonically These have been working happily every day for well over 5 years or so..

Here is a rather dusty P150 that is used to drive one complete speaker.



Doesn't sound like a Krell but it's not too bad, i guess that's down to the circuit design & the fact that it's biased pretty high also. Not unpleasant on the ears in the upper registers which a lot of amps can be driving NS1000 speakers

Here is a Paradigm sub that is used to fill in below about 30Hz where the main speakers begin to roll off. In room it's pretty good down to roughly 15Hz which is rather nice, pity it's a reflex though Looks like it needs a dust as well The old JVC integrated is used to drive a pair of Mission 780 speakers & these are used on the AV gear (at present) & my laptop PC to play music such as MP3 stuff.



My poor Krell KSA250 that is doing nothing at the moment (thankfully) due to it being summer & me having no wish to install air conditioning The Parasound is pretty similar actually.



Acoustic Mass Dampers removed as i don't want to punch holes in the carpet or for that matter blunt the AMDs.

Here is some of the future stuff that will be installed. The PS Audio P600 Power Plant, Audio Research MP1 pre amp (with cobweb - not a scratch though it made me look ) & the aforementioned Parasound HCA1206.




I'm mainly a music person though i'm very partial to movies & good documentaries. I never watch TV & therefore don't have a TV license (not easy to explain to TV licensing when you buy a new TV let me tell you ) & i'm still dealing with the bums right now & waiting for an inspection visit.

So here are a few AV bits. First up the soon to be replaced centre speaker & bass unit.



I have a nice new & unused Paradigm Signature Series C5 V2 to go in there which will thankfully lower the TV as you'll see i need to shortly...

Here is the Philips 56" superwidescreen TV licensing was getting all upset about when i purchased it about a month back. You can see it's encroaching on the projector screen Screen is 120" & i use a Mitsubishi HC5000 full HD projector with it.



The hopefully soon to be moved BD & DVD players as well as 5 input 2 output HDMI switcher - all going in the rack They'll also get used for multi channel music. I have quite a few DTS encoded 5.1 releases from FAX records that sound marvelous when run through a 5.1 system.



To say i like this TV is a serious understatement. With cinemascope BDs & DVDs there are no black lines top & bottom, the screen shape seems to be a lot more natural even after a few minutes of viewing & of course it scales up the 800 odd lines from a cinemascope BD to 1080P as well as scaling horizontally to 2560 pixels. I even prefer watching a lot of full screen films such as Avatar scaled up with the top & bottom cropped, it does that good a job. My Toshiba hasn't been switched on since the Philips arrived.

One screen shot...



& that's all for today folks

Bests to all, bye for now..

[The Vinyl Adventure]

Someone sat on ya tv matey, it's all squashed!
That's an aweful lot of interesting kit you got there, my missis would chuck a bloody nut if I tried to get half of that into our living room!

[DSJR]

Good God man, you've got it bad

I didn't like the KSA250 when I last heard one - very uncharacteristically harsh as I remember and not a patch on the KSA80 or FPB300 we had at the time... Mind you, after a few years driving 1 Ohm Apogees, it may have cooked itself well out of spec...

[Marco]

Nice system, Mark, but why is it all inside your fridge?



Marco.

[Joe]

Nice system, Mark, but why is it all inside your fridge?



Marco.

Cryogenics?

[Reid Malenfant]

Someone sat on ya tv matey, it's all squashed!
That's an aweful lot of interesting kit you got there, my missis would chuck a bloody nut if I tried to get half of that into our living room!

lol.gif at the squashed TV. Honestly it's kind of difficult imagining how big a standard widescreen TV would need to be to give the same screen area with a 2.35:1 or 2.40:1 signal. You are looking at about 70"+. I find myself deliberately looking for cinemascope films which is totally the opposite to what i was doing with my 42" Toshiba

I'm sure if i had a missus that i'd still get away with it as i have another front room, this one is dedicated to AV so it's not like there would be too many complaints. As it happens though no-one is complaining about anything round here except myself yay.gif

Ta for popping in

Good God man, you've got it bad

I didn't like the KSA250 when I last heard one - very uncharacteristically harsh as I remember and not a patch on the KSA80 or FPB300 we had at the time... Mind you, after a few years driving 1 Ohm Apogees, it may have cooked itself well out of spec...

Ah well that is quite possibly the case I was lucky to get a mint KSA250 that had just had a slight problem sorted (DC offset on one channel was a tad high) & had a full service from a Krell technician at a reasonable price i might add. From what i was told the same kind of service would have been somewhere near £1500.00 from Absolute Sounds in London As it is i bought it after it had been used for less than 20Hrs after the service as the chap that sold me it no longer needed a monster like this as he'd just sold his Sonus Faber Extremas.

A friend of mine with a KSA80 has been trying to pry it out of my hands having heard it as he prefers it over his KSA80 & now needs more power to drive his ATC SC20SLs'.

I think you might be correct in assuming it needed a good service to bring it back on spec

Thanks for posting

Nice system, Mark, but why is it all inside your fridge?



Marco.

PMSL With all this kit it'd be a real nightmare to keep everything dust free & clean so i built the "fridge" As i mentioned it needs just a little work & i'll have virtually a dust free environment for all the kit. Dust can't get in at the top simply due to the way the whole cabinet is vented, i wish i'd had a digital camera available when i built the thing (& a PC & a nice forum like this one) so you could see my thinking. I'll get a few more pics of the fridge when i remove everything & before i put all the new kit in so you can see a bit more of what's going on

I like the name fridge, well thought out Cheers for popping in

Cryogenics?

lol.gif Not far off as it does have inbuilt fans for when things warm up

Like the others, ta for posting purpgrin.gif



Bests to all...

[Alex_UK]

Smilies of the year award goes to... Mark!

[Reid Malenfant]

Smilies of the year award goes to... Mark!

LOL, Cheers Alex Loads more where they came from, they'll no doubt be introduced gradually, but that's enough for now...

[Ali Tait]

Wow,some amount of good kit you have there! Have you ever been into valves?