I had been meaning to play around with the quantity of polyfill stuffing in the X-LS Encore since the filling was done purely on guesstimate and no real logic was employed other than the fact that the quantity was just sufficient to fill up the available space - not loosely filled, not tightly filled.
The sound with this quantity of stuffing was pleasing enough to my ears. However, I don't know if it's the optimal quantity. So out came the toolkit and the screws of the woofers came off.
As a starting point, I removed all the stuffing, put back the screws and sat down to listen. Mine uses the NoRez foam from Danny. The character of the mids and highs didn't change too noticeably but the bass suddenly gained a bloat that wasn't there before, especially in mid bass.
So I filled in about half of the original filling, then increased it to about two-thirds of original quantity, but the mid bass bloat persisted. So the whole original quantity went back inside, and the mid bass behaved better. Just to be sure, I stuffed in a couple of handful more polyfill. And a handful each went into the ports.
It now sounds the best that I have heard so far.
Further, I have another observation in regards to this speakers, which I suspect is due to my room: when I started using it by placing it at the position occupied by my previous speakers, it produced a "phasing" like effect in my room. Meaning it sounded as though one speaker was connected reverse, and this produced unpleasant pockets in the room where the sound pressure on the ear was higher. I re-checked all the connections, even reversing left for right, but all this didn't help. Finally, playing around with placement cured the problem. So guys, don't hesitate to play around with speaker positioning. In my room, it works best when given lots of room between it and the front wall. The distance to the side walls matter much less.
PS: one difficult track that my speakers struggled to cope with with - Tone Poem Finlandia (Jean Sibelius), at 20 seconds when the massed tympani started playing. I guess one would need subwoofer reinforcement to hear a convincing reproduction of such complex passages. But it reproduced every other aspect of this track beautifully. The massed tympani sure didn't sound "toneful".
PS2: a favourite test track of mine - Petra Magoni and Feruccio Spinetti on their cover of the Beatles classic Eleanor Rigby (album Musica Nuda) sounds convincing enough, especially in the way it reproduces the cello intro. But the limitation of its size shows up when the bass gets a bit overdriven and very nearly degrades into mushy, toneless and distorted bass. But to its credit, the cello intro to this song is a difficult to reproduce passage even for better and larger speakers.
PS3: I continue to dig the lovely decay of this speakers. I sometimes secretly wonder how things would sound with more resolving tweeter and woofer. Would a RAAL ribbon tweeter (for example) heat up things a few notches? Or perhaps a Wavecor that Hari is using in the new FS made for Francis?
hyeah:
