Turn off slave (Devialet 400)

[GuillaumeB]

@Confused: I figured out, that the bass gets much more volume and pressure with SAM enabled (at 100%), but the speakers loose a lot of their three dimensional sound for most of the music I tried. Have you found an optimum level of SAM for the blades?

The short answer is no. I guess I need to point out that although I have had the Blades and Devialet 240/250 for a year now, I have not had SAM for very long, and I have only very recently upgraded to dual mono. So in terms of SAM / dual mono experience, I'm only a few weeks behind you. That said, I know exactly what you mean. A couple of weeks back I was experimenting with the SAM % setting for a while, after this I had a couple of jobs to complete, with music on in the background, I then settled down to about an hour of proper listening. During this session I did note that some sections perhaps sounded a little bass light, but imagery was noticeably good, as was the quality of the bass, which was laser like accurate, quite superb. I think coincidentally that some of the source material was in fact a little bass light, but what I had not realised until later is that I had left SAM on 0%. So this was almost a true blind ABX test of "SAM 0%", but only by accident!

So I can see that there is perhaps some merit in a reduced SAM %, but I have not yet spent any time seriously experimenting with this.

Also, I have been approaching the optimising of my newly SAMed and dual mono'd system from a different angle. With SAM at 100%, I might occasionally play a specific track where perhaps I feel SAM is doing a bit too much with the bass, or indeed there are occasionally what I call "SAM artefacts", where something sounds just a little bit wrong with the bass, a bit like SAM is working too hard at the very extremes of bass extension. (I get very rare cases where the lowest bass seams to kind of "stall", hard to describe in words) When I happen across such tracks, I stick them into a playlist reserved for such music. The plan is, that when I have built up sufficient examples of such recorded music, I am then going to take some time to re-visit speaker positioning, maybe a bit of room conditioning and similar, to see if this can remove the issues. Such trials would be attempted with other music also, I don't want to risk optimising purely with what might just be a playlist of badly mastered music, for example. And I do think that some of the occasional material where SAM 100% might appear problematic is due to mastering issues, SAMed Blades may well have far deeper and louder bass extension than the original studio monitors. Once I'm happy that speaker positioning etc. is optimised for 100% SAM, then I might try experimenting with 80% 60% or whatever. I suspect the end result might be personal preference or music / mastering dependent anyway.

It's worth mentioning that much of what I have tried to explain here is possibly related to my own personality defects, that is if I have something good that can be set to 100%, then that I where it must be set, I want 100% of it, no less! I'm like this with many things, I couldn't buy a 3 litre engine car, for example, if there was a 4 litre version in the range. I agonise over buying the cheaper "normal" unleaded petrol, when lovely "super" stuff is also available.

That said (having psychoanalysed myself), I think there is some merit in trying to get SAM to work at 100%, because it is designed to work, to be correct, at 100%. Once happy with this, it may well be worth some serious experimenting with lower percentages. I'll keep you posted with anything I find in the future!

Going a bit off topic here but wouldn't it be great if we had some kind of tool to help calibrate the SAM % to the room? So combining speaker and room optimisations.

With SAM 100% my speakers generate huge amounts of bass, with some music it's just too much. So I dial it down and even turn it off. It's not as though it's bad without SAM.

I've already got GIK bass traps in my room, could probably do a whole lot more but would have been so much easier if I had thought of all this right at the start. I may experiment with some Stillpoints Apertures in the future as they are very small and really quite effective.

At the moment I'm experimenting with 20% and it's rather good - IN MY ROOM. That's the issue, it's all about the room.

Guillaume