Way back before COVID I really enjoyed the several days I spent with my wife in Louisville and surroundings, especially our visit to the Beam distillery😉
Mitigating the Bubble
Today after many years of trials and tribulations I have mitigated a sonic aberration a horizontal phase anomaly in my center stage. While the center image was always stable and outlined it seemed narrow and bubble like and I would need to shift my body angle to really lock in the image. This was obvious on many CDs and LPs .
I have many man made fixes that helped the situation but never a total cure. Some of these are now permanent fixtures on the ceiling in 2 different locations. I made my own acoustic panels filled with long hair sheep's wool and 3 Argent Room Lenses. I have laminar flow lenses that focus and stabilize the image across the front stage. I have built and treated an acoustic fan that overcomes the boundaries with in my room by reducing interference. I have loaded my speaker cabinets 3 times with new drivers and now an outboard crossover. This was after my Essence 30s speakers and my Dunlavy SC4s. ..All my components are hard mounted and direct coupled to the floor...on rock solid racks and speaker stands, custom mono bloc amps each on their own stand. All of these devices and angles and positions made the image wider and more focused but I still had that little bubble and shift before me. Always less annoying with each new device and tweak.
So, your probably saying to yourself hurry up and get to the end. The end finally arrived today after having applied a contact enhancer 7 days ago to just 6 RCA ends out of many connections in my system. Today with a friend who has been here a hundred times sitting in the Chair playing the same music as usual he said there was a wider sweet spot. I despise that term but he said it and not me.What we both heard was a super stable center image that was a few feet wide and not just one. The bubble was gone. The head in the vise was gone. Off came the straight jacket and helmet. What I have now in this space intime is a glorious fully extended soundstage with all the meat on the bones and the features of talking heads on a real live performance stage.
I have probably used eight different contact enhancers over five decades but this one blows my mind. This product Nano Flo is the ultimate in transparency.
Tom