Opinions on TacT RCS Room Correction System


Need opions on the TacT RCS : Is this an easy unit to use or do you need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out?
Any thought on its sound or on how much it improves your system. I am considering it as an pre-amp and a correction device. Is it as good as it was rated in "Stereophile" ?
Thanks!!
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The Tact is an outstanding unit. Contact jonathan@goldmanaudio.com He is the most knowledgable Tact dealer I know of. If you have a high quaility system with full range speakers it is really a no-brainer. I love mine.
This genre of compnent poses an interesting dilemma for those using hi res formats such as DVD-A or SACD, or analog. One must subject these signals to a round of A/D and D/A conversion (there is no digital interconnect standard for SACD or DVD/A formats).

I wonder what the effect of this is on the sound?
I agree with Ghostrider. I was thinking that, for products that are available now or have been announced, dCS's Verdi transport and Grieg upsampler/phono ADC would allow things to be kept in the digital domain as much as possible. But for this to work (Verdi -> Grieg -> Tact), the Grieg would have to convert DSD to 24/96. I emailed dCS and they said this conversion is not in the works because of fears (recording industry?) of allowing low-res copies to be created from high resolution formats... The promise is there but it seems like it's still a little ways off.

How about these scenarios?
1) dCS gets into room correction. DSD can travel down a dCS chain - Verdi->Grieg->RCS->DAC.
2) More manufacturers bite and provide DSD (firewire?) interfaces. Tact can follow with a DSD update.

If the DSD interface is bogged down, I'd like to see Tact come out with an SACD transport even if the interface is proprietary, and updated their RCS.
Many TacT users feel that the benefits of room correction outweigh the compromise of digitizing your analog sources. And many (myself included) continue to use an analog pre-amp, which gives you the option of bypassing the TacT with your analog or hi-res digital sources.

TacT has just announced a new model of RCS with 24/192 AD and DA, among other enhancements.
To answer the question in the original post "Is this an easy unit to use or do you need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out?" (which so far nobody else seems to have done):-

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how to use it, but you may well need the patience of Job to figure out how to get it to sound acceptable (and that's the real crunch), as the user manual offers no guidance at all in this regard (basically, it sucks). I've had my 2.2 for six years and I'm still making fine adjustments, having come very close to selling it no less than three times over that period. It wasn't until I downloaded the user manual for the Behringer DEQ-1024 last year (http://www.retrevo.com/support/Behringer-DEQ1024-manual/id/23281bh433/t/2/) that I finally started to make real progress. The chart on page 11 is invaluable and the omission of something similar from the TacT manual is shameful.

The latest versions of the 2.2 incorporate what TacT call an Auto Target Curve Adjustment facility which makes the process a great deal easier, even though the incremental adjustments available at a selection of fixed frequency points are relatively crude at +/- 0.5Db. But they can get you a good deal of the way there, with finer adjustments implemented by way of the 12 band parametric equalizer.

My advice is to set the frequency points on the parametric equalizer exactly the same as on the ATC adjustment facility, in a strictly one octave spread ~ no wider, otherwise what you do at one frequency will overlap and thus interfere with its neighbour. Should your generation of RCS not incorporate the ATC Adjustment facility, the frequency points in question are 16Hz, 32Hz, 64Hz, 125Hz, 250, 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 8,000, 16,000 and 20,000. (16Kz, for example, is exactly one octave higher than 8Kz, whilst 20KHz is the upper limit of the unit's frequency range).

In my experience, the critical frequencies are 32, 64 and 125 for the bass and, for the upper registers, 4, 8 and 16KHz. I recommend leaving well alone anything in between ~ the crucial midrange. Attenuation at 20KHz tends to damp air and sparkle, even though your hearing may not be able to detect in isolation frequencies as high as 20KHz. A bit more lift at 64Hz (than either 32 or 125Hz) adds a bit of (perceived) warmth and body to the midrange, but don't get carried away, otherwise the sound overall can become pushy and oppressive.

In short, the 2.2 can be an interminable exercise in maddening frustration to get sounding just right ~ and be realistic in your expectations, it'll never sound like a pure analog device. If the rose-tinted warmth, romance and lushness of tubes is what you crave, then look elsewhere ~ maybe to the Rives Audio PARC which is a (not inexpensive) pure analog device that does what it does at just three frequency points below 350Hz (but has no crossover, so it can't be used with subwoofers).

But with proper guidance (as I've tried to provide here), you can get sufficiently far along the road to be able to forgive the TacT 2.2 its shortcomings set against the things it can do so very well, not least cleaning up your bass like nothing else. With TacT's own (passive) subwoofers (which are excellent), it's pretty well indispensable.

Reports on the Lyngdorf RP-1 (which is designed to go between an analog pre and power amp) seem to be almost universally favourable. It incorporates an electronic crossover (so you can use it with the TacT/Lyngdorf subwoofers), though it offers only six factory pre-set "voicings" (albeit substitutes can be downloaded, apparently) and none of the fine tuneability of the TacT RCS. Some have said that may not necessarily be a bad thing, as the almost infinite range of adjustments available with the TacT can give rise to acute audiophilia nervosa.

So you pays your money and you takes your choice. Room correction isn't an easy walk in the park to audiophile bliss and the TacT 2.2 route may well be the most tricky of them all. But, for all that, it's a device that packs a possibly unrivalled degree of user adjustability. You just have to learn how to get the best out of it ~ and before you get to that stage, you have to do a lot of tuning out the worst of it.