Martin Logan Ascenti's or the new Vista. Help

Andrewdoan,

Speaking of "warm" Aeriuses, I recently bought a used pair of Aerius i's and am finding the mid-bass a bit overripe. I had the same problem with my Spica TC-60s, though to a lesser extent. I suspect there's a substantial room resonance. Could you tell me if this was a characteristic of your Aerius i's as well?

I've got mine 42" from the front wall and 18" from the side walls in a very lively 12x19x9 room with an open doorway at the back.

Andrew, I've added a Behringer DSP8024 between my HK CD changer and my Adcom preamp, and the effect of EQ is pretty amazing. It completely tamed the room resonance at 80Hz, fixed a huge (-9db) suckout at 40Hz (probably due to an open doorway in the back wall) and yielded flat response down to 20Hz. Not only that, but it smoothed out a 2db peak at 400Hz and a 2db trough at 800Hz, making male vocals less warm and more neutral. And, it tipped up the treble just a tad, really opening up hi-hats and strings. I kind of like the warm sound of the Aeriuses, though, so I reduced the correction from mid-bass to mid-treble by about 1db to restore just a tad of the Aeriuses' character - flat response sounded too bright. Haven't yet done a critical comparison with the Behringer set to flat in and out of the circuit to see if there's any signal degradation. But, its DAC probably isn't any worse than the one in my HK CD changer, and at least it doesn't have to convert analog to digital and back again. I'm very impressed with this unit, especially given its very reasonable cost.