Stacked Eminent Tech LFT-8

[Jason]

Well some of you who've been following my journey as of late know I'm making some changes in my rig. I've lived with a pair of Eminent Technology LFT-8's for a couple years now.

Recently I bought a second pair to run 'stacked' I had intended to wait until I got them all set up at our new house, but patience not being one of my better virtues I just HAD to set them up in my existing room.

I'll post more as I keep getting more gear in (new amps are the last big change), but here's a quick and dirty report. As you'd expect the sound is 'bigger' with more panel surface area. However, my room is just way too small for 2 speakers per side. Since the inner speakers on each side had to move inward, the soundstage has gotten a little congested. I think another reason for the congestedness is my amp is running out of steam. It's 200 watts a channel, but McIntosh uses an autoformer, so each speaker is only seeing 100 watts. This wil be fixed with the Emotiva XPA-1's that will be here tomorrow. Each speaker will get 500 watts, so 2000 watts total. :D

The new pair of speakers has an upgraded tweeter that extends out to 50k, and there is a noticeable difference between the new and old tweeters. That is why I have a pair of the new tweeters on the way to replace one's in the older pair.

Overall, I'm pleased with the upgrade even though at the moment it's less dramatic/impressive an upgrade than I was anticipating. I'm certain this feeling will greatly improve with the bigger amps and more importantly the new and bigger room.

Thanks for reading!

(please forgive the crappy iphone pic!)

[Jason]

Man, I can see I'm in for A LOT of position tweaking. :dizzy:

Over the last couple years, as you'd expect I've become pretty familiar with optimal positioning. So I started with what I know, which is what you see in the pic.

I just moved the inner pair a smidge...I pushed the inner edges back about an inch and a half. Soundstage opened up considerably. Cool!

[skullguise]

Very nice stuff! I love the ET panels, owned the LFT-16 monitors for a while, some of the best midbass-on-up sound in my home!

Good luck getting them working in the room, should be a great expeirence....

[dvenardos]

Like positioning a single pair of speakers isn't challenge enough. :D

[Jason]

These aren't going to work.

First and foremost, they aren't going to fit like I had hoped in the new house. Not with my new Adona stands (NOT giving them up) and the sub. Just too crowded. I'm not really liking the looks of the stacked pair either and aesthetics are paramount in the new place as this is in a more 'public' area.

I did play with them over the last couple of days in the existing room. This may be a bit unfair as that room is just too small (although I did get great sound from a single pair in there), but while some things were better (cellos and bass violin particularly) overall the soundstage felt a little fuzzier. This could be a positioning problem with a comb filtering effect of having 2 speakers on each side.....I don't know. I know I did several a/b tests with a single pair vs stacked and overall I preferred the single pair.

I did NOT compare singles vs stacked with the old amp, just the Emo's (another story).

Anyway, I had already been thinking about just going with the single set after the a/b sessions but when I actually got to moving stuff over to the new house and seeing how it fits...I made up my mind.

Here's a quickie shot I took seeing how things might fit. I've got 2 other Adona stands (on order) so as you can see there's just no room.



The older set is up for sale in the classifieds...

[woofersus]

The room does look better with only one pair IMHO. Stacking multiple pairs is always somewhat of a hairy proposition. Sometimes it works out beautifully and sometimes it's worse than only one. I think that aside from positioning, there's some luck involved with the room dimensions and listening position being perfect for it.

Hopefully you'll get a buyer on the odd pair out and they'll make somebody very happy. :yes: