While I've got this setup up, I think I should at least get an RTA snapshot of the noise and share for everyone's who's invested time thinking about this. And, I'll swap out the Xover. A/B.
Ok.
Would you believe I asked ChatGBT what OPLDF means? It didn't know, which doesn't mean I'm not too square to be hip. What does it mean?those RCA SL12 are no good
just send them to OPLDF
On it's own, it's a fun search (OPLDF in forum search bar) but if the suspense is too much for you, it's the mythical place where the good, not so good, questionable, bad, rare, everything in between parts/projects/stuff from Pass Labs goes to live in the afterlife.
Peter Pan knows the route to get there but rumour has it somewhere in Serbia, behind a curtain ...
What's lesser known is that there is rumoured to be an OPLDF-DF second site in Toronto ... about 37km from me according to Google Maps, but that is actually a red herring.
Thank you for this explanation! It is a quite delightful mythical place that explains so much of my own journey along the way. I've been a fan of Nelson's for a long time, but not engaged enough to benefit from this culture and since my progress in completing projects and experiments has been so slow, I have been wrestling with the accumulated detritus of my own journey. Although I really wanted to learn some things by direct experience and I thought it would be good to start with some classic vintage elements, I have found that my pace of building and critical observation are so slow that I am learning that spending time and money on some things is a real waste compared to using current practices and technology.
For example, despite the nostalgia and lore for vintage compression drivers and horns of certain mfg's, I think some of the really inexpensive pro drivers are much better performing and sounding than vintage. And, I am also trying to reconcile that the best technology in D-Class now may be so damn good and inexpensive that messing with tubes or even, dare I say, single ended class A might not be the practical solution. I really hope to learn how to build passive xover's, but I'm not sure that with todays dsp and actives and bi/tri amping, I may never get there.
I try to always include a bit of aesthetic or nostalgic voodo in my decisions to future proof my choices instead of always trying to figure out what's best, but I'm finding that approach to be costly and less enjoyable. I think I learned something from my RCA Sl-12's. There is something nice in the midrange but I think there's a directivity issue, as we might expect from a 12" radiator and I think the lack of dynamic headroom is also an issue. These are obvious, but I wanted to see how I could discern this for myself. But, in a certain quiet and intimate listening, they might still be useful. There are some old RCA cabinets for these so they could be hung on the wall as lobby monitors for a studio. That might be the right thing.