Hello fellow audiophiliacs.
If you are like me then you have a bunch of the so called setup CD's (Stereophile, XLO, Nordost, Chesky, …). These are all good and most of the time I reach for the Nordost one for the LEDR tests. I wanted to share a setup CD I ran across a few weeks ago. It is the IsoTek ultimate system setup disc. I got mine from music direct but I'm sure your favorite web store has one.
So you might ask why is this one different? It has a person talking and a castanet (wood block). (There is a description of what you should hear but no instruction on how the speakers should be moved to achieve the desired result.) It starts out with the standard stuff left/right and phase. Then it moved to lateral spacing with the person/block being center, 1/2 distance to speaker, in the speaker and outside speaker. It has 33 castanet clicks as it moves across from left to right. That's all great but nothing you really can't get form the lateral LEDR test. It is the next set of tracks that really help you judge your setup. These tracks are for depth of image. For example on one of them the speaker and the castanet are on opposite sides of a room and walk in a circle while the person speaks and the castanet clicks. There is also one where the castanet alternates between left and right as it moves from the rear of the soundstage to the front.
Last weekend I helped the person who bought my Vivid G1's finish his speaker setup. So I pulled out this disc to see if it offered any additional insight. Well, on the track where the castanet is alternating left/right with moving forward it was obvious that the timbre was different from left to right and the depth of image was also different. This person's room is not symmetric and the speakers are shifted to the left of center. He had the sidewall absorbers symmetric. We moved the right absorber about 6" and viola the timbre of the castanet and imaging of the two speakers were spot on.
If you feel like splurging then this CD might help with some subtle fine tuning of your speaker placement.
~Todd
If you are like me then you have a bunch of the so called setup CD's (Stereophile, XLO, Nordost, Chesky, …). These are all good and most of the time I reach for the Nordost one for the LEDR tests. I wanted to share a setup CD I ran across a few weeks ago. It is the IsoTek ultimate system setup disc. I got mine from music direct but I'm sure your favorite web store has one.
So you might ask why is this one different? It has a person talking and a castanet (wood block). (There is a description of what you should hear but no instruction on how the speakers should be moved to achieve the desired result.) It starts out with the standard stuff left/right and phase. Then it moved to lateral spacing with the person/block being center, 1/2 distance to speaker, in the speaker and outside speaker. It has 33 castanet clicks as it moves across from left to right. That's all great but nothing you really can't get form the lateral LEDR test. It is the next set of tracks that really help you judge your setup. These tracks are for depth of image. For example on one of them the speaker and the castanet are on opposite sides of a room and walk in a circle while the person speaks and the castanet clicks. There is also one where the castanet alternates between left and right as it moves from the rear of the soundstage to the front.
Last weekend I helped the person who bought my Vivid G1's finish his speaker setup. So I pulled out this disc to see if it offered any additional insight. Well, on the track where the castanet is alternating left/right with moving forward it was obvious that the timbre was different from left to right and the depth of image was also different. This person's room is not symmetric and the speakers are shifted to the left of center. He had the sidewall absorbers symmetric. We moved the right absorber about 6" and viola the timbre of the castanet and imaging of the two speakers were spot on.
If you feel like splurging then this CD might help with some subtle fine tuning of your speaker placement.
~Todd