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




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