Like Dean said, we first set up everything in his empty room. Here's a pic:
Overall, the room wasn't that bad at all as bare as the walls were. It wasn't entirely rectangular, the wall behind us had an angle into the room where the door was and there was a cathedral ceiling, which probably help tame some of the reflections. We did find, however, that if we pushed the volume a little too hard the room got easily overloaded. The bass wasn't bad at all in the room. Dean will have to provide the dimensions. There were moments where it honked at us a bit, but, for the most part, it was evenly balanced.
Dean and I traded off on listening to CDs. The Manhattan Transfer song was a very nice highlight. Their voices really did float out into the room and had a palpable aspect to them. Very nice indeed.
And, I must say, my Weezer "Maladroit" sounded the worst (sorry JP). It was muffled and jumbled. Really hard to separate anything out of the mix. It's a fun CD and I like it, though.
Like Dean mentioned, we had two different copies of Carmina Burana. Mine was
this version and it did sound a little flat compared to Dean's SACD version (no link
).
After lunch we moved some of the stuff into Dean's theater room. We took his M80s and my Odyssey Loreleis along with the tube preamp, Oppo, and Odyssey Khartago amp and ran the speakers to a switch box--which, sadly, only has impedance matching, but no volume matching capabilities. Yeah, okay, so I'm cheap!!
Here's some pics:
Again, we took turns selecting music, while alternating working the switch box and sitting in the sweet spot. Never mind those pics up there, our first orientation had the Odysseys on the outside and the M80s on the inside. It was easily obvious which speakers were playing as we switched back and forth. Honestly, we weren't going for a true blind test, but more of a way to get the gist of both speakers by being able to go back and forth instantaneously (well, as long as I didn't keep getting the buttons stuck on the switcher).
As Dean put it, what we got were two diametrically opposed musical presentations. To describe it, I'd say the M80s threw out a sound stage that was convex to the listener (the bubble being closest to us) and the Loreleis were more concave. In this respect, it was easily noticeable which speakers were playing. The M80 sound was very centered and right there and the Loreleis were a couple rows further away with imaging cues to the side. All the music was there, the presentations were just so different.
After a few selections we decided to swap positions of the speakers--and, here, the presentations really evened out. It was stunning the transformation it had on the sound of the M80s. Moving the speakers about a foot further apart really gave them some breathing room and opened up the sound. This time, when we switched back and forth between the two, it was somewhat harder to tell them apart.
I'll continue in another post to give my overall impressions.
