Sorry for chiming in late - it's taken me all morning and half the afternoon to catch up missing one day of work (Dennis - you were right, per usual, on that topic).
Yesterday was really a lot of fun and I believe we verified that having multiple enthusiasts together for an exercise like this is much more productive - as well as just a lot of fun being around folks with the same passion and who can speak the same lingo. Almost like a HT barn-raising in a way.
Dennis, thanks for being such a gracious host since we took over your living room for most of the day, and thanks Peter, Adam and Lee for the additional brain power, subjective opinions, and extra fingers to run all the equipment. We had a real assembly line going there for a few hours. I think all in all, we captured five or six calibration runs as we were tweaking Dennis's room - when doing my own by myself I can usually only get in about two in the same amount of time.
I'd also like to note what a great spouse Lee has. Rita sat through this whole ordeal with aplomb, tolerating the room full of male HT geeks only like most patient women can. I told my wife about it and she just smiled and said I'd never get her into one of these sessions without running out of the room screaming after an hour or less.
We were all happy with the result we got after the five hours or so we spent on it. I wanted to keep tweaking a bit more, but the beasts wanted to get to the meat - demoing Dennis's system in its calibrated state. Thanks to all for the kind comments - it is a pretty good looking room now, but we still had some issues at the crossover point from the M80's to the EP600s which can be seen at the tail end of the graph. We played a little bit with phase around that point, and a little bit with the BFD, but at this point most were getting a little glassy-eyed. Gives us something to work on for a future calibration session. Personally I think working on the phase issue would allow us to flatten that part of the curve a little bit, but as everyone commented, the system sounds excellent, and from my perspective, much better than when we started.
From a BFD perspective (I had never even seen one except in pictures before arriving at Dennis's house), it really turned out to be a simple experience after we played with it for one or two interations. I had read many, many horror stories about folks having trouble using the unit, but it always boiled down to them making it more complex than it needed to be, using too many filters, etc. We all kept each other honest in making this simple, and the BFD is a very precise instrument, letting us nip and tuck in a very methodical way. I was personally impressed by how little the filters interacted with each other, which is what leads to nightmares when trying to EQ.
Cheers,
Doug
