@MatthewB
To answer a few of your questions
- as I mentioned briefly before, of all the Legacy speakers I've owned over many years, the Valor are unique in that they perform best with very little toe-in. This I believe due to a couple of things including the SUT (Omnio when engaged) array itself and more importantly the compound driver array and first of its kind tweeter array. When I first heard Valor many years ago when it first came out, I moved around the listening area and also listened across the front of each speaker while moving slowly from left to right a couple feet in front of the larger concentric driver array. It was a Legacy session for the Atlanta audio society and I asked Bill afterwards if it was my imagination or if the inward firing (towards listener) and outward firing AMT modules were playing common as well as slightly different info each. He said that was in fact the case...don't know how they pull that little miracle off however the outboard AMT plays signal intended directionally for the listening position more so while the outboard firing AMT plays a bit different info that is meant to more accurately create the overall room as it were. As a result the typical things required with many speakers that perform best with toe-in that can be drastic or in the case of the Legacy's I've owned and the TAD R1's, aiming the tweeter modules (and thus speaker centerline) on a line that converges behind the listener's head for a foot or more (according to speaker, room dimensions, listening position, etc...does not seem warranted and in fact does not perform as well at all with Valor (tried once,....did not care for it at all). My Valor have very slight toe-in but it is definitely not "zero"
- I always work to get Aeris, Valor, etc. regardless of use of Wavelet or not to sound and image on all my reference tracks in all dimensions at their best before running room setup. In short, I take Wavelet out of the signal path except to use it as the crossover it needs to be but with nothing else engaged. We all have our favorite discs for center imaging, front to back depth, left to right and other panning, listener surrounding effects, etc...I make sure I get this as close to perfect sans all the RoomEQ, Omnio in this case with Valor. Then and only then did I do my first set of sweeps. About 2 months ago, just for good measure as I'd gotten a new digital front-end stack and pre-amp, after they were fully broken in and I was hearing so much more detail, imaging, etc., I disengaged Wavelet and did it all over again from manual speaker setup forward and found with a few tweaks I was able to discern more and improve things much more than I thought. Then I ran the setup routines again and got back to a calibrated setup...
- Contours after the fact: I have several configured however I have 1 baseline contour set stored in memory that covers 70% of material or more. The other 2 are variations of the first one with less of one or two things to compensate for particular hot/bright recordings...
- Contours with V2 versus V1: I'm finding much less tweaking and increasing or decreasing certain bands is necessary than it was with V1...
- RoomEQ: always have it engaged which is pretty obvious
- Omnio: Use it for vast majority of records however when a recording is done with QSound or other modern technique for crafty encoding and enhancement of spatial and "those cool effects", or the studio has added reverb of any appreciable amount, I found what's on the disc is best and I disengage Omnio as "stacking" the mixing tricks and Omnio together is not for the best result. Either one or the other depending upon the recording engineer
- Apodizing DAC: with a SOTA DAC array upstream (Estoeric Grandioso D1s) and also the uplift in quality and capability of the DACs and 64-bit DSP in Wavelet V2, my preference is to have Apodizing DAC now turned off 100% of the time. With Wavelet V1, I needed it on all the time to smooth the effects of the still very capable but v1 older DSP
- positioning: Distance from side walls to the center line of front baffle is 2.5 ft plus a bit. Distance from back wall to center line of front baffle is 4.5-4.6 feet, very slight toe-in. Speakers on 8 foot centerline separation. Listening position a few inches short of 10 feet back... Valor and all other Legacy speakers love room to breathe; wish my room was bigger so I could pull 'em out further!
- Difference between V2 and V1 SUT (Omnio): I've mentioned all that I will post publicly as I've seen this sort of thing trend negatively for manufacturers on this and other forums. One person's candidly conveyed personal observations and preferences turn into perceived flaws or shortcomings and a ding to the vendor's reputation particularly those who build products that reviewers and owners will come right out in public view and cite great performance and equal or superior sound to the fan-boy / industry "faves" and big names. Frankly after 30+ years chasing gear I am tired of certain forces & people out there taking umbrage with a quality speaker from <insert strong performing brand with great ROI here> performing equal and perhaps even more musically and "SOTA" than a more expensive, more fawned over brand....
I am very happy to talk in more detail on specifics via phone....feel free to hit me upon with an IM and we can talk soon....
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