Hi guys.
I am glad you all enjoyed the day and we had the chance to talk at length obout many subjects and setup criteria, I would only add and re-enforce some of the points raised here as follows:-
Never ever under-estimate the effect a room has on the overall sound. Personally when I first visited the room, I thought it was going to be a real challenge and so it proved to be. Many other speakers could not overcome the rooms limitations (and for music especailly) thus the kit that was installed was chosen to ensure those limts were overcome as much as humanly possible. A small note here for those that have not been to TLC, the rooms are ex-studio suites, whilst the other rooms Tony has at his disposal are good rooms, the main demo room designer should have been hung drawn and quartered as only the current crop of equipement and speakers make the room perform really well. It is certianly true that given another room (your own home) you might use less amplification (ADA naturally
)and get even better results, coupled with the delightful ADA Suite 7.1HD or Rhapsody MachIV you cannot help but masively improve matters.
Second, in line with all businesses, a budget has to be set and as a result the existing screen had to remain (but having shown what the Screen Excellence AT material and DNP supernova could bring to the party to universal approval!) but as it was not Acoustically Transparent the main speakers had to go to the side and below the screen, couple that with the fact that this meant the placement was too wide for the seated position and the settee could not be placed against a back wall (for obvious reasons) you have to accept that some slight compromises may be apparent compared with clients own rooms. This will always be more apparent with 2 channel music than movies, that said, Aerial Acoiustics make some of the finest speakers available so ultimate limitations of a room are the only limiting factor that is upon us here.
I would be tempted to say that putting any other speaker in the same positions would just show eveeryone just how well the System 1 was performing. Just imagine for a second what that means if the system was in your home
Third, the Nevo control pad was not programmed (the Nevo guy was going on holiday to Corwall so fair enough!) to allow me to set different EQ presets (of which we have 4 available) nor specific tone/vol presets (a further 4 each) which could have been used to further enhance performance.
The system is ineed very new, apart from the obvious speaker running in phase, big amp power supplies have very large capacitor banks and these also benfit from a bedding in period and heat cycles, I noticed that during the course of the day the amps were getting better and beter and interestingly more efficent as the CD tracks were being played at -18dB (zero being reference level) and could have done with a few less dB later in the day but hey by then everyone was enjoying themselves so much it would have been a bit mean
And remember we used a Blu-ray player for the CD's (abit a very good one IMHO), some would prefer a dedicated CD player to good efect.
Anyway, I close by thanking Tony and Jon for their efforts in putting on the event and having the oppotunity to meet and chat with the assembled masses that formed an orderly queue to witness the HT setup.
I'll wager they all went home dug out the same disks and said "bugger I need that ADA stuff"
I warned everyone listening to this setup would end up with a lot of wallets opening