BrianZ
Active Member
. . . for the last 9 years. 
i bought my Paradigm Studio 20 v3's in 2005 (learned about them in the S&V forum) and fairly quickly discovered one of the woofer drivers was bad. no sweat, the retailer sent me a new one, i installed it, problem solved. somehow i was convinced that i got the positive & negative right (don't remember now) and never gave it another thought. but over the years i had always i felt they sounded a little odd when you were front & center of them, but i perceived it as just kinda extra spacious. since so many reviewers talked about their excellent sound stage i just chalked it up to that. granted it was so wide as to be a kinda distracting, but i loved the frequency balance and the natural sound so much that i just kind looked passed it. "i guess i just don't like a wide sound stage as much as everyone else - no biggie." i preferred the sound when sitting just a little off center because when dead center the vocals tended to get kinda lost. in fact it always kinda bothered me that vocals really sounded best when i was in an adjacent room! and sitting right in the the middle also kinda made my ears kinda feel weird, like a tickle or tingle. i mean, i really should have known something was wrong. jesus, what an idiot. so i've spent the last 9 years occasionally tweaking their positioning in an effort to reduce the soundstage, lol. and don't even get me started on all the trouble i've had trying to dial in the sub i got last year.
anyway a couple months ago i took the 20's up to my bedroom to do some testing & auditioning while building a small & inexpensive bedroom system (settled on a set of PSB Alpha B1's). that 'spaciousness' in the 20's now sounded simply too weird to be ignored when directly compared to the Alphas, and that's when it occurred to me that it's possible i wired that replacement woofer wrong so many years ago. so today i finally got around to pulling out the woofers to compare and confirmed my suspicion. voila - my vocals are back up front & center where they should be. this is really embarrassing, not to mention how annoyed i am to have missed out on great sound for all these years. on the upside, it's like getting a great new set of speakers for free! but now i gotta start over in dialing in my sub.
did i mention what a f~cking idiot i am?
i bought my Paradigm Studio 20 v3's in 2005 (learned about them in the S&V forum) and fairly quickly discovered one of the woofer drivers was bad. no sweat, the retailer sent me a new one, i installed it, problem solved. somehow i was convinced that i got the positive & negative right (don't remember now) and never gave it another thought. but over the years i had always i felt they sounded a little odd when you were front & center of them, but i perceived it as just kinda extra spacious. since so many reviewers talked about their excellent sound stage i just chalked it up to that. granted it was so wide as to be a kinda distracting, but i loved the frequency balance and the natural sound so much that i just kind looked passed it. "i guess i just don't like a wide sound stage as much as everyone else - no biggie." i preferred the sound when sitting just a little off center because when dead center the vocals tended to get kinda lost. in fact it always kinda bothered me that vocals really sounded best when i was in an adjacent room! and sitting right in the the middle also kinda made my ears kinda feel weird, like a tickle or tingle. i mean, i really should have known something was wrong. jesus, what an idiot. so i've spent the last 9 years occasionally tweaking their positioning in an effort to reduce the soundstage, lol. and don't even get me started on all the trouble i've had trying to dial in the sub i got last year.
anyway a couple months ago i took the 20's up to my bedroom to do some testing & auditioning while building a small & inexpensive bedroom system (settled on a set of PSB Alpha B1's). that 'spaciousness' in the 20's now sounded simply too weird to be ignored when directly compared to the Alphas, and that's when it occurred to me that it's possible i wired that replacement woofer wrong so many years ago. so today i finally got around to pulling out the woofers to compare and confirmed my suspicion. voila - my vocals are back up front & center where they should be. this is really embarrassing, not to mention how annoyed i am to have missed out on great sound for all these years. on the upside, it's like getting a great new set of speakers for free! but now i gotta start over in dialing in my sub.
did i mention what a f~cking idiot i am?
