SAM lab - Australian news for SAM lab.. read if you want your speakers samed.

[Confused]

Does anyone know how SAM lab actually work? Assuming the dealer with SAM lab does not have an anechoic chamber handy, how does SAM lab actually measure bass response, and how is this not influenced by room acoustics? I'm slightly baffled, and intrigued, by this.

[Antoine]

Of course an anechoic room would be most accurate but if you put your microphone near to a loudspeaker sound you can quite accurately measure the 'real' outputted SPL and freq. response, almost all acoustics software can "separate" the direct sound from the reflections. The reflections 'arrive' at the mic later of course, piece of cake for a computer to measure that difference in time.

Alternatively one could measure the bass response of a loudspeaker in the open field. (as in "outside" )

[Confused]

High end outdoor hifi with beer, barbecue and SAM lab. Genius!

[Antoine]

Haha

[NickB]

Is there a microphone?

[Charlemagne]

Is there a microphone?

This is how the SAM lab looks like. The display also shows a Laser indication if you read it closeby

[mirekti]

I know many use high end cables and even though SAM is available on Devialet's web page it should sound a bit different when used at home with your cables (for those who hear the difference). Namely, SAM corrects the speakers, but does not exclude the cables, it corrects for them as well. Hence, some people started to claim that different cables improves/degrades the sound.
Ideally, one should take his speakers and cables and get their own SAM profile.

[hkychan]

Hello all, I have one pair of my speakers Samed in Shanghai last week. The whole process only took half an hour with the Sam Lab device. According to the engineer of Devialet, there are only 5 Samlab boxes exist in the world. Only one in gold color which was the one displayed in Munich show. The others are in sliver.

The Samlab device have to work with a D200 box as you can see from the attachments in the next post. 

1) A MBP computer is attached to the Samlab box over USB cable. 
2) Samlab is attached to D200 over USB cable. 
3) Samlab also attached to D200 over the 8 components interface.
4) Samlab attach the speaker through speaker cable.
5) A tripod is setup to stand in front of the speaker with a laser pointer connect to the Samlab via USB cable.

As some of you may know the theory behind SAM. The technology is only focus in low frequency which is <= 150 Hz. The engineer explained to me that the system generate very low frequency signal and such signal is delivered to the speaker over the Samlab box to D200 to the speaker. 

The laser pointer will detect the vibration of all bass and mid range units and send back the signal to the computer for further analysis.

As my speaker Wilson Audio XLF has 2 bass unit and 2 mid range. The engineer did the same calibration for four times.

After all, he will have to fit the signal curve in the MBP. The program is coded in Matlab with an interface to make his life easier. The end result is a model optimized for the speaker.

[hkychan]

More photos ....

[hkychan]

A few question that I asked the french engineer.

1) As my XLF is relatively new, will there be much different for testing result between a new speaker and a speaker used for 2 years? He said the different is insignificance. So they don't need to re-Sam again years later. In fact, he only Samed one of the XLF speaker. But he himself is the one behind the 200 speakers Sam in the Paris lab.

2) As the entire process require no microphone, the environment of calibration is not required with sound proof facility.

3) Are there any speakers in the world that cannot be Samed? The answer is yes. He further told me that with Sam version 1, there was 5% of speakers cannot be Samed. Now with Sam version 2, it dropped to 2%. I forget to ask him which type of speaker but I would imagine the kind of speaker is MBL as it would be difficult to measure the vibration. (Just checked from http://voteforsam.devialet.com/category/...=sam_ready and it shows none of the MBL speaker is Samed)

The improvement

After the Sam process, they will have to do some modification to make the result work for dual mono (D800). So we only tested the improvement with one D250 afterward. We did a blind test. The improvement is quite obvious in the low frequency (bass). According to the official description now that you can find from Sam page for XLF. The speaker can reach 17 Hz now which was only 31 Hz before Sam. 

In addition, the cohesiveness of the high, mid and low are much better now with Sam. I am very happy with the result.

The Tour

As far as I know, Shanghai is the first destination of Devialet Samlab tour. The team is in Beijing now. Next will be a few others cities in China. By end of June, they will be in Hong Kong. I have booked for my other pair of speakers to be Samed. It is "Kharma Exquisite Classique". I also booked for another friend in Hong Kong to have his "West Lake Tower HR7" Samed as well.

In July, the team will travel to a few other places in the Asia. South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Australia are in the list. I have the contact with their Greater China (Fiona) and Asia representative who will travel together with the engineer. The girl who will travel with the engineer to Australia is Carol from Singapore. I may be able to ask them directly about their plan in Australia.

I must say that Devialet has a very good customer service and they do try their best to support their fans like me. As they originally did not plan to visit Hong Kong. But they changed their plan for me. I am sure they may do the same for others of their die-hard fans.