Categories: Custom Home Theaters

WINNER ANNOUNCED!!…WIN A LEXICON MC-12B FULLY BALANCED SSP WITH MICROPHONE KIT AND ROOM CORRECTION UPGRADE

Thank you to all of the CAVE Members…….we have awarded the Lexicon, as announced in the CAVE…….The winner ofÂ the Blu-ray discs will be announced on Friday!!Â Â The next CAVE award will be “Officially” announced in next week’s Newsletter…..(HINT:Â something special from our friends Downunder!!)Â So if you haven’t signed up for the Newsletter, please do so now…..

Sign up as a member in the Secrets CAVE and you will have a chance to win our reference Lexicon MC-12B SSP (we are changing it out for a different SSP because we need HDMI audio inputs). The MC-12B is a superb product that can be used as a two-channel preamp if you wish, and it includes the four-microphone kit for room correction. It also has a full set of pre-ins for all channels, so you could connect your Blu-ray player’s analog pre-outs to the Lexicon and listen to your movies in Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio. All output channels are available as fully balanced XLR or unbalanced RCA. It can be set up as 7.1 with a discrete left subwoofer and right subwoofer output along with an LFE output.

The retail price on this SSP was $10,000 (not including the microphone kit and room correction upgrade), so don’t miss your opportunity to have one. Second prize will be a big box of Blu-ray movies that we have accumulated over the past months.

I wish I didn’t have to move this unit out of our setup, but we need HDMI inputs that process audio, for the purposes of testing other products.

After I took the MC-12B off the rack, I tested it with our Audio Precision analyzer.

Here are the graphs.

At 1 kHz and 2 volts output, two channels driven, THD+N was a very low 0.005%. That is really excellent. There are second and third harmonics, but nothing visible beyond that.

Using a combination of 19 kHz and 20 kHz sine waves, the B-A peak at 1 kHz was 88 dB below the fundamentals. Notice also there are only a few peaks surrounding the 19 kHz and 20 kHz fundamentals.

THD+N vs. Output Voltage is shown below. The output starts its sharp upturn at 2.3 volts RMS, and clips (1% THD+N) at 2.6 volts.

Here is the box of Blu-ray movies that will be given as second prize.

So, sign up, and good luck.

The winners will be randomly chosen from the list of CAVE members on January 15, 2010.

John E. Johnson, Jr.

Editor-in-Chief Emeritus. John E. Johnson, Jr. founded Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity in 1994, shortly after publishing a hardcopy book of the same title. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity until 2022. John has been involved in audio and video for more than 50 years, having built radio transmitters, amplifiers, turntables, and speakers from scratch. He was also one of the founders of the Northern California Audio Video Association, now The Bay Area Audio Society. John holds four university degrees, including a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and has published numerous scientific books, along with dozens of scientific articles on biomedical research topics as well as imaging technology. He was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of two medical/scientific journals for 20 years. John holds several patents, including one on high resolution image analysis and one on a surgical instrument. He has been affiliated with NASA, The National Institutes of Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Stanford Research Institute, and The University of California at Berkeley. He is President of the consulting firm Scientific Design and Information, Inc., which is based in Redwood City, California. John resides in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and multiple kitties! His daughter, Cynthia, who was an integral part of SECRETS for many years, resides in San Francisco.