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Setting up Quad 988 right

Hi all,

I got a pair of Quad 988 for 2 months now. Enjoy it a lot, however I feel I might not have set it up right. My problem is I feel that the image height is too low. Is this true for Quad ESL speakers. Does anyone experience this. My speakers are set up around 6 feet apart, toe-in considerably, listening position is about 8 feet from speaker plain and the speakers are tilted up as well. Speakers are 4-5 feet from the front-wall. Please kindly share your experience. Also my room dimension is 17x21 feet.
haipo
mrpresident
45 posts
 
Jeffery, you are correct, I did not plan to equal space them. Some sacds have the diagram for the layout included in the packaging. My upstairs room/ceiling is 17ft wide by 20ft or so with an 8ft flat ceiling and no back wall, instead it opens into my ground level living room that has a vaulted ceiling and is two stories high plus the vault, and the same width as the upstairs but is about 35ft long. I may add one or two "center" rears in addition to the five and/or a pair for side fill. That would be 8 or 9 988 quads total! I use two 18" Velodyne subs and have two more if I need them. I am planning on additional floor standing speakers for the front two channels for no spl limit material such as big band music and marches! Avantgarde duos are among my considered speakers, I have two pairs of large Nova's set up currently, one pair facing forward and the other next to them but facing rearward, bass is excellent and ambient information is greatly enhanced similar to the Quads. They fall very short to the Quads though in resolution and ability to properly recreate music. Listen to Christina Aguilera's Christmas album and you will notice how multiple drivers with crossovers totally muck-up her beautiful and complex vocals. It is a good demonstration of phase errors in my opinion compared to the wonderful Quads!!
haipo OP
11 posts
 
Dear all,

Thanks a lot for all your comments and advices. I will try to move the speakers around to see if I can the the image to heighten up a bit. To answer Wc65Mustang, my amplification is Atmasphere M-50 MKII OTL. I loave the combination. Prior to Atmasphere, I use Plinius SA-250 (still have one on hand), but I didn't like it as much compared to Atmasphere (for 988). Any other suggestion.

Hai
wc65mustang
524 posts
 
Haipo,
That's interesting because I used 3 amps on my 988 and the Atma-Sphere was by a wide margin the worst regarding bottom end control. The impedance on the speakers drops to 2 ohms around 10KhZ if I'm not mistaken and OTL amps including AS do not handle loads like that very well. AS amps really strut their stuff with impedances avove 8 ohms. My M-60, however, sounded terrific in the mids. I also used a BAT VK60 for a while but the 988's in my listening room sounded best with a Pass X150.5 believe it or not.
Good luck!!
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