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Writers: Stephæn & Pete

[The above image is The Horned One by Laroche which you can see at the DeviantART website]
In the Temple of Earthly Delights, somewhere in Washington State.
The final chapter. How the DEQX tamed the Po’ Lil’ Things.
Background. In 2006 Stephæn and Pete heard a pair of Cogent True-to-Life all-hornspeakers at RMAF. This was a seminal listening experience. A year later on an airplane to Denver and RMAF, Pete startled Stephæn with the cockamamie notion that it would be not too tough (easy is the word of which Pete is most fond) to build a poor boys’ version of horns inspired by the Cogent experience. See Hornographic Pursuits Part I. After the Po’ Boys came a 29' long sub-horn dubbed Das Alpenhorn - see Hornographic Pursuits Part II. Later in that year Stephæn secured a pair of the now almost unobtainium RCA midrange drivers discussed earlier and we began planning a pair of hornspeakers for his listening room. See Hornographic Pursuits Part III. Now is the time to wrap things up with this final installment of the Hornographic Pursuits Series.

Part I: Pete Riggle’s perspective. Tales of our hornographic pursuits have regaled 6moons readers. Here it will suffice to comment once again that at Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in 2006 we heard a pair of Cogent True to Life three-way horn speakers in a room shared by Ron Welborne and the two principles of Cogent, Steve Schell and Rich Drysdale. It was after midnight in a dimly lit hotel room long and narrow, speakers on the long wall. The latter were somewhat ungainly. Given the shape of the room, the prospects of good sound seemed remote. When the stylus hit the groove we were transported into space by a fabulous blues singer with a smoky voice, a harmonica and a guitar. Who was that guy? We haven’t figured it out to this day but we want that record. What we didn’t know at the time was that we were listening to vinyl through a digital system. That doesn’t seem right, does it?
Hornographic compadres in crime - Pete & Stephæn
With encouragement from Steve and Rich, Stephæn and I began construction of the Po’ Boys two years later, the configuration of which was suggested by the Cogent horn systems we had heard at RMAF. It was well after we had completed construction of the Po’ Boys using a three-way 24dB/octave passive crossover that we learnt how the Cogent speakers we'd heard at Rocky Mountain had been tri-amplified with an electronic crossover provided by a DEQX PDC 2.6P. After a couple of years struggling with the passive crossover, I borrowed from Steve the DEQX PDC 2.6P unit used at RMAF and eventually bought it from him. As it turns out Steve and Rich eventually chose a passive crossover for their systems believing they could hear the digital fingerprints of the DEQX. Stephæn, Pete and visitors to their listening rooms have not heard the DEQX fingerprints. Kerry Brown, a hornologist in San Francisco using a DEQX, has suggested that anyone who thinks they can hear the digital footprint of the DEQX give his system a listen .Stephæn and I are very happy with DEQX processors in our systems and would not choose to take on optimizing a three-way horn system without one. Pete’s fairly early DEQX processor works well enough so that he's not feeling the need to upgrade to a newer model with reportedly improved components.

The DEQX. The DEQX manual is notorious for failure to communicate in a way that anyone but a Tralfamadorian (supplied by Kurt Vonnegut) could understand. However without assistance from an expert we eventually, with much cursing and head scratching and all by ourselves, figured out how to use the DEQX to do driver crossover and room equalization in my Po’ Boy system. This system is still in the crossover and EQ mode without taking advantage of the speaker correction capability of the DEQX nor its time delay capability. This is because Pete has lots of irons in the fire. I believe an adult human being as opposed to a geek could write a preface to the DEQX geek-talk manual, said preface communicating in English (possibly other languages too) what the DEQX is, what it can do, the options available in using it, where the data are stored and so on. This would go a long way in helping the user to get started. In the systems of Stephæn and Pete, left and right channel analog signals are routed from the line stage to the DEQX. The DEQX separates these signals into a bass, mid and high-frequency output for each channel. I once tried sending the digital signal from his Musical Fidelity VDAC II to the digital inputs of the DEQX but did not care for the results. Perhaps I did something wrong. The DEQX is set up using a Windows computer. The DEQX operates at a bit rate of somewhere around 96.000 bits per second. This may be high enough to render the digital effects acceptable.