General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories.

---

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ General Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Tact RCS 2.2X Preliminary Review (long)

Posted by hexenboden (A) on September 1, 2002 at 16:44:18

Move over Harry, the age of enlightenment has arrived.

Alchemy is out. No more tweaking to death, no more moving speakers inch by inch and looking for the perfect toe-in angle, no more debating corner versus center placement of subs, this or that cable, this or that preamp. No more pining for a Burmester or MBL front end. No more spending thousands of dollars on glorified tone controls. What, exaggerating, me?

Even in the short time I have lived with it, it has become clear that the Tact RCS 2.2X is a truly revolutionary high end product. Which is remarkable being that there is not much revolutionary stuff around, in the audio department, these days. But the Tact is both groundbreaking and indispensable, in my opinion. I would go as far as to say that I can’t imagine any system that aspires to achieve state of the art music reproduction without a 2.2X. Is your room perfect? Impossible. Are your speakers faultless? I doubt it. The Tact can fix all that. The Tact corrects actual frequency response in the digital domain. Actual response –the one that reaches your ears.

Do not judge this as a full review. Consider it a preliminary evaluation, to be followed-up by myself and hopefully by others. There is much to talk about, and it is all at the core of this hobby ( there is a specialized Tact forum in Yahoo). Beginning with room acoustics and its effect on bass reproduction.

It is a fact that, however good your speakers are, your actual in-room bass quality can’t possibly get anywhere near a Tact-corrected bass frequency performance. By the way, near full range speakers (i.e. flat to 40 Hz) and separate subs is the way to go. And for obvious reasons. Otherwise one cannot possibly achieve good bass response and good performance in the rest of the audible spectrum at the same time. Unless you have a humungous quasi-anechoic listening room at your disposal, optimal in-room placement of a full range frequency transducer is highly problematic, in fact, virtually an oxymoron So I’m sorry if you just purchased full range, single-box speakers for forty grand –you will still have to get a subwoofer, and a Tact.

Even if you already own a superlative mains and sub system, without the Tact, room interaction and limitations in sub design will invariably result in gross bass response aberrations. You get the bottom octave but at the expense of considerable muddiness in the overall sound and an intolerable clouding of the mid-bass. Plus, from time to time your bass will be accompanied by subterranean vibrations that sound a lot like the E train (my listening room is located in rural Columbia County, so other than the actual subway vibrations actually present in some recordings, those rumblings should not be there). If you don’t already have a Tact and think that your bass below 60 Hz. is fine, I’m afraid you are probably mistaken. Comparisons with live music would prove it. However close to perfect bass you are getting I assure you it is still far from what the Tact will achieve for you. Among other things, the Tact will allow you to define the crossover slope between mains and subs, and to integrate them in terms of seamless frequency response and correct time behavior. Simply put: with the Tact, bass is king.

I am less versed, at this early point in my acquaintance with it, on the Tact’s feats with the rest of the frequency spectrum. That is, mids and highs. Further experimentation is in order, and you will see why. For starters, together with the bass, the Tact machine also “corrected” the unabashedly romanticized voicing of my Silverline Sonatas Mk I. Put it another way: in stripping the sound from many of the inevitable drawbacks and compromises of (particularly) crossover design, the Tact also mercilessly altered the speaker’s character. It brought forth tonal truth to the Sonatas, but inexorably this was at the expense of their creator’s original intent. So what? Did the Tact throw the baby out with the water? Not in my view. You see, other than for the midrange driver, which employs a higher order filter, the Sonatas use first order crossovers. In addition to other desirable outcomes, such as the speaker’s excellent dispersion characteristics and clean sound, this crossover arrangement also yields a noticeable midrange coloration, essentially a crafty highlight and downplay of certain base frequencies and harmonics. The effect can be seductive on vocals and massed strings, but it is not truthful to the source. Yet, it is a coloration I have happily lived with. The Tact has stripped this bloom away completely, and I have to admit the speaker has become all the better for it. The bass bloat is gone but the music, all of it, is still there. Salome has cast away her last veil.

The Tact notwithstanding, the Sonatas retained all of their outstanding dynamic and dispersion characteristics, as well as their ability to cleanly reveal detail. Not the least because the Tact also relieved my Art Audio Jota SET amplifier from spending its energy on lower frequencies, which are now being routed to my self-powered Sunfire sub, courtesy of the Tact. Doubtless it would have been impossible for Mr Yun, the speaker’s designer, to achieve equivalent results with conventional crossover design (not that he necessarily would have, could he have). And did I mention how the Tact turned the Sunfire, a fine subwoofer burdened –as they all are-- with considerable limitations, into a world class bass transducer? It did. And in doing so, ruthlessly, the Tact will tell you more about the system you currently have than any other component I am aware of. You will be able to measure and actually listen to how your system departs from perfection (you can actually switch back and forth between no correction and several correction curves by means of a by-pass button in your remote). The Tact may also make you eat humble pie, as it did to me, by actually showing you how close or far from flat response you thought reproduced sound should be. Quite remarkable.

To sum up, I am ecstatic about what the Tact does to my system’s bass, and I am impressed, as well, with the changes it brought higher up in frequency. Better still, it did this in the comfort of my own home, without having to “dial in” room data and wait for the manufacturer to send me a correction filter (a la Sigtech). My unit also includes a parametric equalizer (although I can’t fathom why I ever would need one now). And I can also get rid of my preamp (those of you who do not trust digital volume controls can keep it –for me the tradeoffs are clearly in favor of no preamp). I look forward to having great fun with the Tact; in the coming weeks I will continue to experiment, particularly after I get the nerve to install the ceiling diffuser panels which are still in their boxes (I don’t have a tall enough ladder to do it). Tact’s own listening room is treated for higher frequencies, where the wavelength is very short and it is therefore harder for any correction device to determine whether it is “listening” in a manner similar to human ears (I can expand on this if it isn’t clear). As you may surmise, I am not yet completely sure regarding the proper usage and value of the Tact with regards to mids and highs. But so far the Tact has delivered as promised.

Are there parameters that the Tact does not address? Certainly. The Tact will be ineffective as a means to fix other common speaker limitations such as non-linear distortions, lack of detail or transparency, or constrained dynamics. It will also not make a limited system full range. But the Tact will allow a speaker which is already reasonably good in these departments to reach its full potential. The soundstage will expand, literally, in my case, about two feet in each direction. The actual recording, and not a colorized version of it, will be present in your room, and you will hear the acoustics of the recording venue, as opposed to that imposed by your speakers or room. Of course, to access the unit’s full potential you need to start with reasonably designed quasi-full range speakers and a sub. So perhaps your forty-K speakers were not such a bad investment after all. In fact Tact sells some nifty ribboned line sources priced exactly at that level (I have not listened to them), which can be mated with their subs.

Finally, the Tact may be beautifully built and supremely flexible, but is it definitely not a “plug and play” appliance. It will require some effort from you to understand all of its workings (by the way, the optional DACs are truly fine, they actually sound good even when fed from the Toslink). And you will require a PC with a DB9 serial (RS232) connector (beware, many laptops do not have one, USB adaptors may or may not work) to run the software. But the bottom line is: I believe that properly used, the Tact RCS 2.2X will improve any system in existence today. Some may not appreciate that it can “de-romanticize” a system which is so inclined. But in my view there is nothing more romantic than truth. The question then is, can your system handle the truth? And can you? Take up the challenge. If you are a serious audiophile and –most importantly—a true music lover, the Tact RCS 2.2X will forever change the way you approach audio.

(PS. I was unable to post this as a review since I received a message indicating there were multiple manufacturer codes for Tact)

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Schiit Audio

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---