Considering the New Tekton Design Encores? AND Owners Group - Experiences/Questions

@h4k4lugi 

Thank you for sharing your setup and experiences. The half Ulfberhts are a clever solution.

Fast acoustic bass is definitely a priority. I wonder if room correction would do you any favors blending the subs with monitors. Room correction had a huge positive impact on my sound even after noticeable improvements from room treatments.

Did you notice any loss of planar type sound with fewer tweeters on the half Ulfbehrts?

My guess is the full size encores would be hard to beat. Once again, I'll likely forego the 300B SET for either 805 SET Chifi or tube pre/SS class A. When the will to spend more arrives, then add subs and digital xovers.

GR Research's open baffle subs for faster bass and less room mode challenges might fit the bill. Eric at Tekton is moving that direction as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see an open baffle version of the 1812. No more box sound, fast bass and low mass transducers! A Tekton version of Spatial Audio speakers.

@jayctoy Thank you. My Impact Monitors were flat black (including the Center channel I kept) but the gloss gray on these towers is nicer.

@brotw 

1) room correction.  Yes, I ran REW pre and post the room treatments you see pictured.  My room is about 13' 4" wide and 6'11" tall and 24-28' deep (non flat back wall) which produces these room nodes (below is without EQ but with room treatments):

So in Roon, I run 3 very narrow_Q EQ bands at -6 to -8db cutting at those peak freq's.  The nice thing about Roon EQ/filters is with the swipe of a soft-switch you can A/B your music in real time.   The biggest differences are in the 45 and 95hz cuts, the decay went from 900ms to < 200 with the EQ and the GIK corner traps (I don't have those waterfall graphs on this PC)

So the 'overhang' and 'ring' got much much better with targetted EQ, but the "gap" (not in volume, but maybe in tone/phase? not sure) between the monitor's 6.5" drivers and the 15" HSUs I couldn't reconcile.

Eric said his subs sound fantastic with the impact monitors - and I believe him - but I already have two subs, which aren't terrible (the HSU ULS-15) so I didn't want more subs. And if you are in the market for multiple subs (for their benefits) 2 of these: https://tektondesign.com/product/subwoofers/2-10-sub/#color cost the same as a single basic sub at most places)

Time allowing this week, I'll re-run REW with these Half Ulfberhts and see how they compare vs. the monitor+sub tested before.

oh, about: "Did you notice any loss of planar type sound with fewer tweeters on the half Ulfbehrts?"

Can't say, I've never heard the full Ulfbehtrs (or Moab or Encore) or anything with the 7+1+7 setup.  The monitors have the 6+1 ring, and I love that setup.  As I stated above, I had ML's and full size Maggies in this very same room, with these subs even, and the Tekton midrange is just awesomely fast and transparent, but more dynamics.

BTW not sure if this voluminous thread has linked to the AVS forum post of someone figuring the tweeter ring crossover, but it's very interesting.... 

We all 'know' only the center tweeter is a true tweeter and the 
"6 round the ring" go lower (much lower, to cover the 440hz (?) string of a violin per one of Eric's youtube videos), but the AVS deconstruction noted that the left and right 2 of the 7 go lowest and the top/bottom ones (above and below the center one) go a bit higher in freq - so the high-midrange appears to be a line array by the middle 3 vertical tweeters. and below that in freq, all 7 join in (ie: the 2 left flanking and 2 right flanking also participate).  a super elegant way to get around the comb filtering assumed by "yOu h4vE sEVen tWeEters??!!??" people.

Thanks for all the crossover info on the array. My mistake on missing the extra tweeters as I had encore monitors on my mind, so no loss of tweeters moving to the half Ulfbehrts from DI monitors.

Dirac live has mixed phase filters that really helped lock in imaging and time alignment in my earlier system. Not saying REW can't get you there. My brother had good results with REW on his Parasound JC5/ Martin Logan set up. GIK corner traps and bass traps did knock several dBs off the peak to valley differentials in my room but not a total fix. 

If you've already done the initial sub set up, which includes getting the phase constructive with the mains at the crossover point, then I don't have much else to add.

A digital crossover from MiniDSP would be more precise about matching the Xover frequency as identical on the mains as the sub, and you could try out different rates of high and low pass roll offs. Dirac live could quickly solve a best matched filter for many different Xover configs, treating the combo left sub and left speaker as 1 main speaker. Could better integration be found there? Possibly, but my guess, like yours is that there will always be some tone differential as they are in different boxes using different woofers.

Maybe open baffle speakers and subs don't have as much integration trouble. One thing is true, going with the lower reaching mains and Xover will quickly get you better bass given sufficiently powered mains.

Right now, from my BAT preamp, which has 4 outputs, 2 per channel:

* XLR out go to the purifi/Buckeye amps

* component/RCA out goes to the HSU subs, and enabled their onboard x-over to allow only below 30-35 hz to the sub.

I like my system now, a Dirac or some form of digital EQ (regardless of using Roon) was in my roadmap... but I just got the Bacch4MAC spacial tool, and turns out (spoke to the Professor/founder at Capital AudioFest) that he/it can handle the EQ in the digital domain, so I'm going to see how it does and disable the 3 EQ cuts in Roon.