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Old 04-24-2020, 08:12 PM
jimtranr's Avatar
jimtranr jimtranr is offline
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Join Date: May 2011
Location: Corvallis, OR
Posts: 1,589
Default Less is More...with three Aperture IIs in the house

My bedroom is my primary “serious” listening venue. That’s because the audio system in the much larger living-dining room shares space with a flat-screen TV that gets a lot of viewing, and in the interests of maintaining domestic harmony—well, I think you get the picture.

The bedroom is just that, a not overly large (11’x13’x 7’8”) room stuffed with a queen-size bed, a pair of nightstands, a wide lowboy dresser topped by a couple of freestanding jewel cabinets, and an array of DIY stackable-slatted LP storage modules that fit nicely into an “L” in the wall created by the abutting clothes closet. To fill out the furniture complement, I’ve managed to shoehorn a DIY audio equipment cabinet (that I’ll have to replace with another one to cure a newly-created power-cord spaghetti tangle) into a corner, while the speakers sit with their grills about two feet out from the wall on DIY sand-filled pedestals flanking the dresser. My program material is hard-drive-sourced CD and SACD rips and high-resolution downloads of classical, jazz, film scores, vocals, choral, and a smattering of opera, while my “listening chair” is the foot of the bed, which places me forward of the center-of-room null.

To render this less-than-optimal lashup more than mid-fi listenable, I’ve played with a number of acoustic-treatment options over the last few years to deal with room modes, speaker boundary interference response issues, first reflections, etc. The most satisfactory solution I hit on involved a front-, side-, and rear-wall collection of four-inch-thick absorber, scatter-plate/absorber, and diffusor/absorber panels (would you believe 16?)—most of them 2’x4’ in size—that all but engulfed the room and made it look like a padded cell straight out of Franz Kafka...or, alternately, a mixing studio crafted by Edgar Allan Poe after he’d tippled too much amontillado. My wife tolerated the setup and said she heard an improvement with each treatment iteration, but to this day I don’t know what she might have been muttering under her breath—or how often.

Once I followed up this room-treatment regimen with a series of power cord and power distributor upgrades, I figured that I’d wrung all that I could out of the system within my fixed-income retiree budget. The sonic presentations were much better-defined and more tonally as well as dynamically nuanced float-free-of-the-speakers holographic. Relatively speaking, it turns out.

It was at that point that I started reading comments here and elsewhere about the Stillpoints Aperture II. That turned my curious eye toward my discretionary penny jar. In late February I had enough coppers to order one panel (thanks to Ivan), and what it did after replacing the 2’x4’ diffusor/absorber at the center of the front wall pushed me to get two more in stages over the next two-and-a-half months.

The following photos depict the placement of the Apertures at the speaker wall’s center and the right and left first reflection points. Since the right first reflection point coincides with the location of the aforementioned LP storage modules, I fabricated a cleated, screwed-from-the-inside faceplate for one of the modules from scrap lumber to provide a solid surface for the right Aperture’s mounting screw. The top of each of the two reflection-point Apertures is 43-1/2 inches above the carpeted floor. (I found that, using a 7/64” bit, drilling a hole in a wall or comparable mounting surface 3-11/16” below the desired top-of-frame height and inserting the supplied mounting screw and collar washer there places the Aperture at precisely the selected height when it’s hung via its rear-mounted flange.)











Before commenting on the specifics the three-Aperture configuration brings to the performance table, I’d note that the Apertures not only replaced the 2’x4’ panels that previously occupied those spaces but, as listening would demonstrate early on, obviated the need for (1) the two behind-the-speaker absorber panels that had flanked the front-wall center panel and (2) the two floorstanding scatter-plated absorbers that had covered the left and right second-reflection point. That’s a net reduction of four 2’x4’ panels in the bedroom system’s acoustic treatment complement. And they won’t be coming back.

Having achieved, pre-Aperture, what I considered a pretty convincing replication of a given recording’s performance venue (where that was the intent of the producing/engineering team) with all the previous tweaks of the room acoustic and AC power delivery to the audio system, I was rendered “holy merde” dumbstruck by the first few notes of my first audition of the three-Aperture configuration, the first movement of Miklos Rosza’s “Tripartita for Orchestra” (“Modern Masters I”, David Amos conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, Harmonia Mundi CD rip) and remained that way through the conclusion of the movement. The CD, which also includes compositions by Morton Gould, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Marc Lavry, is a soundstage gem—open, spacious, and layered to the nines. I didn’t realize just how open, spacious, and layered, however, until the Apertures were in place. The soundstage expanded laterally and front-to-back with more definitive detailing of the ensemble’s individual constituents, the venue’s spatial and ambient cues, the score’s inner voicing, and both the macro and microdynamics infused into it at the conductor’s pleasure. Most impressive, however, was the seamless integration of soundstage “air” with that of the bedroom. They fused together into one entity, floating the performance freer of the speakers and putting the listener in the concert hall—and breathing the same oxygen--to a far more convincing degree than I’ve ever experienced with this system. It’s as close to “immersive”--or “enveloping”, if you prefer—as I’ve ever heard in stereo. If I were asked for a visual analog to describe the sensation, I’d call it “Cinerama”. (I’ve never attended an IMAX presentation, so I won’t go that far.) Further listening with comparable decently-engineered orchestral, and then choral and opera, recordings reinforces that “you are there to an unprecedented degree” impression.

What the new configuration doesn’t do is impose a spatial gloss on acoustically “dry” or hard-panned-to-death recordings. The soundtrack for “Evil Under the Sun”, a pastiche of Cole Porter tunes masterfully arranged and conducted by John Lanchberry, is unfortunately Mojave-dry and -flat, and despite their ability to elicit more accurate instrumental tonality from the recording, the Apertures do not wave a wand of 3-D liquidity over the soundstage.

What they do—among their many virtues--is rip a layer or two of gauze off recorded representations of the human voice...whether it’s Jane Monheit in “A Shine On Your Shoes”, Nicolai Ghiaurov in “Aria of Konchak” from Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor”, Sarah Vaughan in “Someone to Watch Over Me” performed live with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, or The Turtle Creek Chorale in “Make Our Garden Grow” from Leonard Bernstein’s “Candide”. In each of these instances—and every one of several others—there’s more tonal “meat” and nuance to the voice(s) as well as a more palpable evocation of the space around them. One can discern, for example, the air between Ghiaurov’s lips and his mike, reflecting just how effectively the Aperture configuration reveals the performers’ spatial environment.

Instruments and voices “breathe into” and “work” the space around them, and it’s that interaction that helps define what we hear as tonality and timbre as well as attack, sustain, and decay. Given the Aperture configuration’s ability to tease out the performing space in such granular detail whether the performance is symphony orchestra or guitar duet, operatic chorus or vocal solo, fortissimo or pianissimo, I’m not surprised that I’m hearing considerably more musical “there” emanating from the speakers. It’s unrestrained, unforced, and unfatiguing.

I could go on with the usual spiel about the improvements noted in all the finite audiophile usual-suspect categories--and they're there in spades--but I’ll end here by saying that I’m enjoying the heck out of the system with the Apertures in place. Enough so that a fourth is in the order on-deck circle. It’s slated to replace the 2’x4’ diffusor/absorber that currently inhabits the center of the rear wall.
__________________
Jim


Bedroom: Aurender N150, TEAC UD-505 (AKM version), EMIA Cu Elmaformer passive line stage, conrad-johnson MF2500, Paradigm Studio 20 v5. Shunyata Delta D6, Altaira CG hub. Shunyata Alpha XC, Delta NR v2, Alpha USB, Alpha and Venom CGC/SGC. Wireworld Eclipse 8 interconnect & speaker cables. Stillpoints footers, Butcher Block Acoustics maple platforms. Stillpoints and GIK acoustic panels.

Home Office:Windows 11 PC/JRiver 31, TEAC UD-501, Luminous Audio Technology Axiom II Walker Mod passive, conrad-johnson Sonographe SA-250, Paradigm SE-1. Shunyata Hydra (Original Version), Venom 10 NR. Wireworld Eclipse 7 interconnects. Blue Jeans speaker cable.

Living-Dining Room: Windows 11 Laptop/JRiver 29, Oppo BD-83, TEAC UD-501 DAC, SOTA Sapphire TT, Graham Slee Era Gold V, Ortofon 2M Black, McIntosh MR-77, c-j Sonographe SC-25, c-j MF2500, Paradigm SE-3. Wireworld 8 IC, Blue Jeans SC. Shunyata Hydra 8 v.2, Shunyata Delta NR, Venom NR. GIK 244 bass & scatter-plate panels.

Last edited by jimtranr; 04-25-2020 at 07:10 PM. Reason: typo
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