DIY Loudspeakers: HOME  INDEX  UPDATES  RESPONSE  WHAT'S NEW 

FUSION-BAD, built by Petr
Copyright 2022 © Troels Gravesen

21-01-2023
Troels, 
Just a quick update. What a beautiful difference it makes going from Naim to my first tube amp - a Primaluna EVO 100  integrated.. Sibilance is gone, very musical and exciting. Sounds probably closer to what you had in mind with your gear. Good fit, to my ears, with the FUSIONs.. 
Best regards and thanks again, it amazes me this kind of quality is possible in DIY.
Petr


03-12-2022
Hi Troels,
After a few weeks of tinkering and with some time to listen, here are my impressions of the speakers.
My goal in this build was to get somewhat closer to the feeling of natural sound, mainly of classical music, that I’m used to hearing in concert halls, both symphony and chamber music. I was also looking for a relatively simple build, high-quality components, and active control of bass. The FUSION-BAD seemed to tick these boxes.
My setup is simple – Naim Nait CX2, Naim 5SI CD player, Cambridge CXN-V2 streamer, Troels Gravesen inspired speaker cables (that’s how I found this site a few years ago). Nothing fancy, but very enjoyable.
Going from B&W 703’s to the FUSION BAD is a significant improvement on many fronts. Better transparency, more space, more detail, everything very clean and separated (especially noticeable in heavy orchestral parts with vocals), while creating a very pleasant natural dynamics as a whole.  As advertised, obviously much better, tighter bass (which is surprisingly very important for classical music), very clean midrange, and a tweeter that is very detailed, but in my conditions, had to be tamed with a little bit of extra resistance at R1. It’s a delicate balance to attenuate the highs, without losing all the detail and muddying the whole picture as a result.
People should be aware that great recordings will sound great, and not so great ones will sound not so great. Also, I used the Hypex to balance an uneven bass response of the room between the two channels by boosting the bass on one channel by a few dB, which is helpful.
As for the build, it was an interesting challenge from the precision point of view – you better pay attention to tenths of a mm if you want everything to fit nicely. I had a local kitchen cabinet maker cut the main panels on CNC to get the basic structure right. Building the crossover, setting up the Hypex and adjusting the filters was pretty straightforward.
All in all, an extremely enjoyable project. Very generous support from Troels despite the fact that some of my questions were already answered in the provided links…
Thank you so much for lot of future music enjoyment.
Petr
Quebec, Canada