Achieving High Fidelity Sound

The spatial qualities of the Alpair 11MS are fantastic, much better than with my headphones. Due to true binaural perception, you get proper phantom imaging. I much prefer the nearfield open baffle sound, with drivers lifted closer to ear height and with spacing and toe-in as pictured. Pulling the drivers further away from the back wall helps to keep the direct sound as dominant as possible and I really like it. I just need to get a parametric EQ to these drivers, to flatten the response. I will use MySphere as a guide to help me judge what frequencies to alter. If I can match the sound balance of MySphere, these will be better. I tried the virtual barber shop recording with these speakers and it sounds amazing. The positioning of everything is more directional with a larger soundstage size and it really makes your hairs stand up on end.

Now for how to EQ. I was originally looking at the miniDSP 2x4 but it is analogue input only and I don't wish to use any DAC in my system other than the Majestic. I also wish for there to be only one D-A conversion in the signal chain so I would prefer for any digital signal processing to be done right at the start, straight from the output of my Pink Faun soundcard. The Nano Digi looks like the product to go for and it is 5V, so I can power both the Pink Faun card and the sound processor with Graham's DAK linear power supply. The Nano Digi has four separate coaxial outputs, so I can connect it straight into the Majestic DAC and onto the Proprius. For a single driver per channel setup, my current system is fine. If I wanted to create a two-way speaker system, with a pair of helper woofers with their own digital EQ to support the 11MS in deep bass reproduction, I would need a second Majestic and two more Proprius to control them separately. This option is cheaper than trying to speaker-fy MySphere or K1000 with a sound processor like the Smyth Realiser A16 but is still expensive. I will see how I get on with EQ'ing the single pair of 11MS to start with but these are quite exciting times.

When I can substitute my PC motherboard for a Hackboard 2 SBC hopefully in August and add a linear power supply, source fidelity may improve further. So many things to try but at least I have some trustworthy direction.

An additional DSP box between the PCI card and the majestic will lower the SQ, since there's at least one extra clock (and hence jitter) to worry about.