...and it is good.
Equipment: HSU TN-1220HO with 500W amp, M3Ti, Panasonic HE200 receiver, some Panasonic DVD used as a CD changer.
I've been living with a pair of M3Ti as my mains for music enjoyment, and they've done a great job considering everything: size, price, placement. (All important given the spousal acceptance factor.) They're stuck in the top diagonal corners of my living room, 9 ft up hence out of the way of the decor, and they would get an impressive room gain on the bass, so you'd hear down to the 50Hz range easily. The overall fidelity was good enough but it was pretty annoying to hear the volume of the bass line go up and down as it walked across the room resonance.
OK, so I finally decided to spring for a sub. The main issue in terms of the spousal acceptance factor was that she didn't want to see it. She thought it could go under the piano. Um maybe not. Then I realized that there was room on the floor in a corner, BEHIND our audio armoire. The armoire is a big wooden beast, but it had room for a 1x1ft square sub. And whadyaknow, the TN-1220HO is supposed to have the best bass per unit footprint or whatnot and it could fit right behind the armoire, invisibly.
It came in a couple days ago. The amp is a surprisingly large mutha, about the size of a typical receiver. Fortunately, it fit nicely UNDER the armoire, with a centimeter to spare. btw I'm not worried about overheating, given that I'll never drive the sub all that hard.
Since the M3Ti had pleased me with adequate bass I set the crossover at 100Hz (more on that later). At first I goofed around listening to whatever CDs I had, with obviously significant bass lines, such as a whale song CD ("Deep Voices"), and Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Carmina Burana. But when I listened to some Cole Porter (from the De-Lovely soundtrack) with a simple bass line, it had what I think is called boomy bass, i.e. the bass would just overwhelm the rest of the music. So I finally got around to balancing the bass (I used a Radio Shack SPL with my receiver's white noise source) and found that I had the bass something like 10db too high. Oops.
With the sub balanced, it not only was invisible behind our furniture but it became invisible audibly. The bass line would simply go up and down and not have a hint of weakness or strength anywhere. Another good song I could hear the smoothness of the bass was Fields of Gold on Sting's Ten Summoner's Tales. When I get a sound test CD I'll try to quantify this, but I suppose it kind of makes sense intuitively that a sufficiently large sub won't stimulate resonances in what is effectively an even larger cavity behind the armoire. Perhaps to our ears it sounds like the entire armoire is a single big sub, in a matter of speaking.
At this point, I had a full-range system, with a reasonably non-colored response aross the entire audible spectrum and a bit above and below. Cool. Now it was time to goof around with tweaking...
And what I found was that just raising the cross-over frequency to 150Hz made a huge improvement. Yup, I'd seen it mentioned so many times about relieving burden from smaller speakers with the sub, but now I had a chance to hear it for myself, i.e. letting the TN-1220HO handle the 18-150Hz let the M3Ti act like a small satellite. Perhaps their placement in the diagonal corner made this a bigger deal than it would for other people (they might have been causing resonances even in the 100-150Hz), or the TN-1220HO just is flatter than M3Ti, but anyways, my wife commented, "It sounds like it's more in stereo now." Yeah, there was a marked improvement in how the instruments in a recording would be separated in the audio. (I didn't hear much difference with 200Hz crossover, and besides I think the M3Ti should be big enough to handle some bass!)
Then I popped in my Babylon 5 soundtrack. (Yes, I'm a geek.) This is pretty dramatic techno-orchestral music that was used on a sci fi show to accompany spaceships flying across the screen etc. So there's a lot of neat audio effects, and when I listened to this it sounded and felt like a movie soundtrack as heard in the theatres. It just put you in the middle of the music and everything was happening around you.
My wife, bless her, was so impressed that SHE suggested we should look into using this as the basis for a home theatre. So that's probably our Christmas present for next year, a rear-projection system that you can mount when you want to watch a movie and put away when you don't. Gotta keep it compatible with the decor after all.
So to summarize:
M3Ti for music is good.
M3Ti + TN-1220HO for music is better.
M3Ti + TN-1220HO now wants to be used for home theatre.
