I'm curious were the boosts being used on the cd player? Or power amp?
What's wrong with not running a preamp? lack of coloration? To me it seems the only issue there is poor speaker placement.
I've never been in Butches, so I dont know what kind of guy he is, but a lack of preamp should help, not hinder the sonic qualities of a speaker.
There was volume pot on the CDp presumably attenuating the output signal that was run directly to the amp.
Dan has heard these speakers using the same SeeDee. Granted, it was in a different room, but also with different equipment. He felt they didn’t even sound like the same speaker. We both found the soundstage to be flat, one dimensional, lifeless & everything was focused at the speakers. No separation. Very little center information. Granted, the excess bottom end boom could have been mostly from the room, but there was detail and tonal quality missing at the bottom end, too.
We re-played the test SeeDee at my place as soon as we got back. There is a track with multiple voices that are positioned individually across the stage from left to right. Played on my home system the origin of each individual voice can distinctly pinpointed to an exact location across the soundstage. At the 802D demo, all the voices were lumped together as a group, indistinguishable from each other and focused just a bit to the center of the right speaker. Something like this is more than just speaker placement, IMHO. This is what prompted us to look closer at the electronics.
Please don’t get me wrong, I am in no way bashing Mac gear. It’s nice stuff. I’m just relating what I thought was an interesting experience I had recently.
