[terry j]

Otto, I didn't answer before cause I didn't fully understand your questions, and thought I could get clues from the answers of others ha ha. But, for someone as helpful as you towards others to have your question float lonely in the ether simply meant I must expose my ignorance for the whole world to see!! ha ha ha.

I have absolutely no experience with either of the other two BFD's, so unfortunately I can't directly compare the sound of the units. My gut feel is that the deq would be cleaner and more transparent, but having just written that I have no idea why that should be so, maybe it has been written elsewhere and I have a vague memory of it, but as I say I personally wouldn't know that one way or the other. Humph, maybe YOU will be the person to clear that up for us??

I have mucked about with integrating a sub with mains as you describe above, and yes it does work. From memory though, I didn't particularly use the shelving filter, don't recall exactly why not but think it was kinda due to the slope on the shelving filter was shallow or something. Anyway, by combination of geq and peq was able to achieve a relatively sharp lowpass to the sub. My mains are flat to 29 hz as measured from the listening position, and so it was simply an experiment to see whether or not I needed a sub for the last little bit down low. The experiment by the way was a little indeterminate, if the sub was between the mains (I'm on a wooden floor) then it seemed to be on the same joist as my seat and the rumble was often not in synch with the mains (ie the rumble did not integrate well), and if the sub was behind me I could tell it was behind me. Both were horrible. Anyway, that lead to another feature of the deq that you may not have considered yet, integrating it as I did and as it seems you might, allows the sub to be further away than the mains, as the signal to the sub can be delayed by the deq and therefore time aligned.

Dynamic steup I haven't played with, quite frankly the manual sucks (for me) and my background knowledge is not sufficient to work it out.

In practice, the few systems I have used it in to equalize the bass the ;limited bandwidth of the filters has not been a problem...there is always the first time I suppose!

I think what you where asking about fft bins was it would be good if all the 'sliders' on the unit where concentrated down low?? As you say, they are not. But with the combination of what is available with both the geq and peq in the area of interest a pretty good job can be done.

If you where over this side of the lake I would gladly lend you mine to evaluate, but a bit impractical methinks as it stands.

My gut feel. As you will only be using it for below 50 hz say, then I think a lot of what you pay the money for will not be utilized, so you may be better off using the more high quality unit of the bfds that are available. This of course is leaving aside the question of "is the deq more high quality than either of the bfd's", an answer I can't give as mentioned before.

From memory, you have a set of Vandersteens?? I know nothing about them, but if you were to use the deq then it is of course possible to use them on the mains as well, and correct the whole shebang. There is a limit to the quality of the system that you would use the deq on, wheteher that limit is reached with the vandersteens I don't know.

By the way, you wouldn't use the automated functions of the deq down low, simplt run sweeps in REW and tweak manually, then run sweeps again.

I am more than happy to run tests on specific questions if you wish, have been tempted to do that a couple of times in the past, need to take it all over to the other system and set it up. Could run the unit straight thru the rew setup to check it's electrical response, as Brucek has done with mics etc. That for example will tell us whether the boosts add as you asked above.

Thats enough for now, let me know if that has helped or not and whether you would like me to do whatever tests that would help. I am not super clever on that kind of stuff, but if it is the fashion of 'monkey see monkey do' then I guess I would be a pretty good monkey!