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Alleric
08-17-2012, 03:22 PM
Research, research, research.

Sometimes, particularly with all things audio, I think things to death. That pauses for a bit today though. Sierra 1 LCR order placed this afternoon.

Just the wait, the arrival, the setup, the break-in... And then the onslaught begins. 40 or so discs I know backwards and forwards. Hopefully I can get the analysis done in the afternoons before the Mrs gets home from work, or I'll drive her nuts I'm sure ( she appreciates the tech and the sound, I'm just far more thinky about this sort of thing ).

Anyway, all faith.

Thank you to Mr. Fabirkant for putting up with my random questions and calls this past year.

Anyway, some of you may recognize me from the Hsu sub threads over on AVS.

hearing specialist
08-17-2012, 04:08 PM
Good for you on your new purchase!!! Mighty fine units i must say :D

Dark Ranger
08-17-2012, 05:06 PM
Hi Alleric,

Welcome to the family! :cool:

Now the wait begins while your new Sierras are assembled, tested, packed, and shipped direct to you. The sleepless nights of anticipation. The mild obsession with selecting the right tracks for audition. It's enough to drive a man completely insane. :D

Thanks for sharing!

darkpoet25
08-19-2012, 04:41 PM
Welcome aboard, nice selection of speakers. :) When you get a chance, feel free to share your impressions. I know I'm glad I picked Ascend as my speakers of choice. What finish did you decide to go with? Yes, like Tom Petty once said, "The waiting is the hardest part." :p

Alleric
08-20-2012, 11:49 AM
Welcome aboard, nice selection of speakers. :) When you get a chance, feel free to share your impressions. I know I'm glad I picked Ascend as my speakers of choice. What finish did you decide to go with? Yes, like Tom Petty once said, "The waiting is the hardest part." :p

Oh believe me, I have enough else going on professionally and personally that the waiting will not be painful. Not that the previous sentence is a complaint by any means. I just have plenty to keep me busy until they arrive... and beyond.

As for sharing my impressions... there's no real need to fear that I won't. Sound reproduction is one of those topics I have to try very hard not to either bring up or latch onto around friends and family unless there's a direct need or eyes begin rolling (in a good way, mind you), people get their popcorn, and someone cue's up "Do You Feel Like We Do" from Frampton Comes Alive to see if my... um... simple? response to "how to I get better bass respose in movies?" takes more or less time than the track.

Anywhoo... I was out of town last week, and both ordered the speakers and posted this thread from my phone, ergo why it wasn't terribly fleshed out.

I'm a Taurus, I enjoy long walks on the beach... er... wrong forum.

Quick and dirty:

I have decades of music performance under me ranging from jazz ensembles (bass) to symphonic and chamber performances (bassoon). I spent a bit of time (read as: 2.5 years) of undergrad studying composition and music theory. I geek out crazily on timbre representation, inter-harmonic relationships, overtone series, inter-instrument balance, etc.

I have decades of lay-speaker-design experience as well. I consider myself a very, very dangerous newbie in this regard. Frankly, I would know more, but that would require me diving headlong into technical whitepapers from acoustic and electrical engineers and spending boatloads of time parsing things out until I truly understood them. I already have a technical career, I don't need another one just yet (maybe in retirement).

Most of the "extreme" speaker experience I have is from the car audio realm (I probably just sent some folks in the room into convulsions). I was the weird kid, though. My response curve was flat. My front components played down to 30hz (old MB Quart back when they were independently made in Germany). My subs didn't even come in until then. My sub enclosures, if even ported, were tuned to subsonic frequencies so that the cone of the driver wouldn't impale itself on the coil and motor when my pipe organ tracks would be laying down fundamentals at 15.8hz.

Anyway, I'm babbling, but this all aludes to my mindset about these sorts of things, and why I've given consideration to Ascend's products. I want accuracy. I want tight transient response. I want to be able to close my eyes when I have the second movement of Scheherazade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheherazade_(Rimsky-Korsakov)) on and be able to point to the principal violin, then the bassoon soloist (and be able to hear the key clicks from the upper barrel... few tweeters can pull this off). I want to be able to put on Underworld's "Second Toughest in the Infants", or Soul Coughing's "El Oso" and hear bright, and sheer where it's appropriate... but never harsh. I want to put on Don Dorsey's "Bachbusters" and never be able to tell where the frequency points are in the crossover because I can hear timber shifts.

But hey, at the same time I want to be able to throw on "Back in Black" or "Women and Children First" and shift the furniture a bit. :)

Note the part where I said this was the "Quick and Dirty".

I talk a lot. :P

Oh, and Natural finish. That bamboo look is the freakin bee's knees, and it's contrasty enough with the birch console it's going on that it should look like a wholly different surface, and not a wood transition (which are a pain in the ass to get right). The kitchen cabinets have a finish that can lend itself to turning... orange... if presented the wrong transition wood. The console and the kitchen cabinets are a doorframe away, and right now they jive. The Natural bamboo should be neutral enough to not bork that up. You may be noticing that that was a fairly specific explanation and thought process. It's a long story.

curtis
08-20-2012, 12:31 PM
Welcome....and Wow! I'm looking forward to your thoughts!!

Mag_Neato
08-21-2012, 06:36 AM
^^^ What Curtis said!

Interested in your impressions!

Alleric
08-21-2012, 09:46 PM
I catch quiet moments sometimes in between tasks and duties. Dinner cooked, dinner eaten, my main pc rig repaired, pool pump timer replaced, lighting solutions for the main den researched, stroller and pack 'n play assembled (zero hour in November).

It's in these moments that anticipation festers.

Oh look, the new Counter Strike is done downloading. Time to go fill the last 20 minutes or so before bed. :)

Alleric
08-27-2012, 05:12 PM
The speakers arrived early this afternoon. I had some work tasks to finish up, so I had to wait a bit before I could unpack them. That is now complete, and the speaks have now been hooked up in their locations. I have done at best cursory listening to key portions of key tracks and I will warn you all that I will be presenting an insanely verbose review. Right now, though... initial impressions.

Environmentals:

1. Packing was very good. Speakers arrived in perfect condition.
2. Q plug "A" is being used, as the L/R are within 2 inches of a wall, and the C is within our entertainment console.
3. MCACC has been used to recalibrate the environment with the new speaks.
4. Subwoofer integration has been completed. Used HSU setup CD and other material.

Listening notes:

1. Scheherazade: The key clicks from the bassoon were indeed audible... but barely. I highly suspect the NrT upgrade would resolve that completely, but I cannot afford that upgrade at this time.

2. Second Toughest in the Infants (Underworld): No anomalies detected (see closing note below).

3. Hornsby & Skaggs: No anomalies detected (see closing notes below).

4. Bachbusters: Speechelss (see closing notes below).


Closing note:

So the counsel I used to give people back in the day when choosing speakers and setting up listening environments for music was this: noise, sound, pitch, voice. I still hold to this simple view. Noise is the first detection of any waveform, as messy or as clean as it is. Sound is slightly more discernable. Pitches even more so. Voices are when you can fully recognize what you are hearing.

Ascend folks, you have one very... very quiet speaker. When I say queit, I mean that there is so little hangover on transients, the damping is so good, that spaces between sound events begin to manifest where they normally do not. I heard voices and details on things I haven't heard since the days of my MB Quarts, and even then, this is a vast, vast improvement over anything I've sat down in front of. Someone might call this "clean". Bachbusters and STitI were just rediculously clean. Timbre is just driiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipping off of these speakers.

Bass response. Um... I didn't even notice I'd forgotten to turn the sub back to "plus" after recalibration until I put Bachbusters in, and even then it took stuff that I knew for a fact went subsonic to trigger before I went "hey, why isn't the couch shaking?". Also, watching that little 5.25 dance it's precious heart out on warble tone sequences from 16-30hz was beautiful. As sarcastic as that sounds... it's not sarcastic... and I could pick up audible "somethings" during that passband. It wasn't pitches or voices, but it was sounds. Once the warble sequence made it up into the 30's... there be bass. This made things super easy when integrating the sub: cross it over somewhere in the mid 30's and set the level.

Maniacal cackle moment of the day:

So there's this guy named Shaun Ryder. Many moons ago he used to front a band called Happy Mondays. Not-so many moons ago a band called Gorillaz, who loved Shaun so, asked him to do some vocal work on a track. Funny thing about Shaun is he's got this amazingly strong Manchester accent, almost comic at times. Well the Gorillaz folks decided to just roll with this, and taking Shaun's pronunciation of the final word of this phrase, "It's coming up, it's coming up, it's coming up, it's there", named the song after it: Dare.

On the Sierra's... I can hear the "th" plain as freakin day. There's like one other set of speakers on the planet I've heard that has done that (not that I'm some worldly sage (and well funded) speaker reviewer or something). I totally lost it.

Right now Slacker radio is feeding up a steady stream of decently-cranked-up trance, breakbeat and electronica to the main living area, and even in here in my office it sounds clear as a bell. I'm going to wander back in and clean the kitchen up a little bit while it rolls.

Break-in has begun. I wouldn't look for anything super-critical as far as a review for at least a week. I think we may watch Hunger Games or Inception on them tonight. Should be a hoot.

Alleric
08-27-2012, 05:38 PM
Massive Attack - "Black Milk":

Just disgusting (awesome).

Seriously. I feel both beautiful and dirty listening to it. Vocals are just etherial and thick, as they're supposed to be, and the bass... it's hard to describe to people what dub and dirty trip-hop bass is supposed to sound like. It's a boom without boomy. Maybe the best analogy is a water balloon... it's inflated, bloated but heavy with all the grace of a... water balloon. That's wrong.

Air balloon. Same size, but not the same mass. Huge, graceful. That's what the bass in this track is supposed to sound like, and it does.

Alleric
09-21-2012, 01:40 PM
So... time has passed. Things listened-to. Bits and pieces in between massive amounts of professional and personal tasks. Oh, and occasional playing of video games to keep my sanity. I grew up in an arcade... what can I say?

Anyway.

I still plan on doing a monster write up. I... plan... to, but things for this fall are still stacking up, and are spilling over into the spring quickly.

Suffice to say for the moment that I absolutely adore these speakers. If I were local to Mr. Fabrikant and his crew in SoCal, I would trade him the only thing I feel I could fabricate in parallel to an equivalent quality level: smoked pork shoulder. My hat is truly off to you guys. These things are stellar.

In the quick:

1. Imaging/Staging

Even if you're putting these near a wall, if you can, at all, at all at all, give them a little room behind to breathe. Even as little as 4-5 inches makes a world of difference. Definitely get the front baffles out in front of the plane of your TV if at all possible.

Once this was done, a fabulous soundstage emerged. Center image is rock, and I mean rock solid. I haven't had the time to put these things through my armada of test cd's yet, but so far it's been crazy good.

2. Frequency response (Bass)

I have never heard a bookshelf speaker handle real, honest to goodness, dyed in the wool bass as deftly as these things can. This is not an allusion to bass. This is bass. Especially in the dead-center sweet spot within the sound field. At that spot I am measuring damn near reference at 35hz. It wanes as you move left or right, and outside of the soundfield I can't say the same, but dear lord, when you're on the couch these things are incredible.

3. Frequency response (Treble)

All the way up, very clean, very balanced, fewest timbre shifts I've detected of any speaker I've owned.

4. Sound qualtiy (general)

These things are so very clean. Clean up top, clean down low, clean all over. Add this to the stage they throw and even plain old television sounds worlds better. Even the freakin Monday Night Football broadcast the other night was noticably better. I don't even WATCH the NFL normally. We were floating by on the channels and it sounded that good.


Anyhoo...

This weekend is totally blown for critical listening. Both days 100% booked, and both nights I'll be recovering accordingly. However, I highly suspect some of that recovery time will be spent on the couch watching selections from a certain Indiana Jones boxed set on blu-ray that the Amazon fairies brought to me on Thursday. Me and the Mrs do loves us some Indiana Jones. :)

Alleric
12-25-2012, 10:48 PM
So three months passed, much has changed. I still have little to no time to do a mad critical listening session and write up a solid raving review.

I'm mainly just writing this up as a giggle. My brother in law and his wife are visiting for the holiday. He hooked up his ipod to the main setup this morning to play some Christmas music and was just floored. I then walked over and shut the sub off to show him that what he was hearing was damn near completely coming from the bookshelves. He was impressed.

We've spent the rest of the day in between food and fun listening to tunes and watching movies. They're in putting the Avengers through its paces right now in the den.

Methinks you may have another customer headed your way soonly, Mr F. :)