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[ReticulatingPigeonElf]

Holy crap guys. I've had a break through with my system. I'm flabbergasted by what I was able to accomplish using this ear method. I'm really floored by my results. And I was starting to get rather frustrated with my hardware, thinking maybe I made a bad selection of gear, or that I'd have to shell out another grand to make any further improvements. I was wrong.

Honestly, I was a bit skeptical at first glace of the thread title - maybe even condecendingly. But reading into it further made me curious. Then I thought, why not, I'll give it a shot.

Some background; my x794 hu has dta in .06 foot increments (or .07, I forget). I had initially calibrated the system by measuring my listening position to each speaker, like I'm supposed to. Those measurements are:

tweets mids sub
L 4ft 3.25ft 4.72 ft
R 4.75ft 4.5ft 4.72 ft

(The tweets are mounted to my stock kick panels - only a few inches further away from my listening position than my mids, which are in my stock door location)

I've had the nearest values for each of these measurements dialed into the deck. The result is an imbalanced image with holes and peaks all over the place. Like audible swiss cheese. I just didn't get it. Why didn't my sound resolve? I measured and remeasured everything. I thought I was screwed.

So I started off by unpluging everything but my sub and right mid - mid channel low passed at 200, eq flattened. I sat in my front seat postured as if I was driving, put in some pink noise, closed my eyes and focused on what I was percieving. At first, nothing. I started adding and subtracting the distance values on my right mid.

Eventually I started to notice what seemed like a faint chunk of the rumble swooping from right to left. After a while, I left the mid where I thought the percieved rumble was centered most. It was pretty close to where I initially had it.

Moving on, I continued with what the OP suggested, but eventually veered off on my own. I turned off the sub, and plugged in my left mid. The mids where now isolated to themselves. At this point, I ditched the pink noise and started playing a 250hz tone.

Here's where the magic happens; I started off with the value of my left mid at the distance it is from my listening position. Eyes closed, I moved the inrements up and down, regardless of how "off" they seemed. Click, click, click - nothing happenening...ehhh. Then suddenly, as I continued moving the value down, the 250hz tone started to move to the right from what seemed like somewhere on the driver door/inside my left ear. It traveled clear across my steering wheel then quickly veered back to the driver door/left ear. I fine tuned it back to what seemed dead smack center of my steering wheel. Then I looked at the value on the deck.

Left mid: 1.25 feet away

WTF?!? So my right mid is 4.72 feet away, and my left is 1.25 feet away? Seriously? So the mid physically placed in the lower portion of my door is just an illusion eh? My mid is actually sitting in my lap, in some kind of quantum paradox? Okay, I see. Guess my deck came from a parallel universe where "here" is actually "there." Matter of fact, whoever is still reading this, it may come as a surprise to you, but you're actually the one writing this. Cats are actually dogs, and Elephants are actually jel...ok sorry. But yeah, you could imagine my bewilderment - my excited bewilderment.

I then quickly dashed over and isolated my right mid and right tweet. xover on mids back to 2,500 hz low passed. 3000hz tone. Moving the right tweet distance value did nothing, so I decided to plug everything back in, and match the tweet distance values to my mid values. After this, while playing a music track, the high end was still slightly skewed , so I moved the right tweet value one notch further away than my right mid value, and my left tweet value one notch further away from my left mid value.

Final values:

tweets mids sub
L 1.31ft 1.25ft 4.79
R 4.79ft 4.72ft 4.79

BOOM.

My image is now crystal clear, with the sound stage smack dab in the middle of my steering wheel. I was in a trance listening to some of my favorite tracks, until suddenly my deck turned off in the middle of listening. Ah! Whoops. Drained the battery. Oh and cool, the deck reset to factory settings. And then I stabbed myself.

Haha, thank god I wrote down all the values. I turned the car back on (dang, I really did drain the battery.... the car barely started). After quickly plugging all the values back in, I was in business. Continued listening with the car in idle. Had to open the garage for the exhaust, and it was raining - but hell if I cared. Finally I begrudgingly turned the car off, the gas light when on! And we all know how cheap that stuff is!

In conclusion, this event made me a true believer in the TAuris method (auris - latin for "ear"). Sometimes to get it done right, you gotta do it yourself.