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Playing with B-2 power amp I made an experiment and instead of loading to it the MiniMe Bass section I loaded the B-2 with Macondo’s bass arrays. I made add-hog attenuator and coil to EQ MiniMe MF with Macondo’s bass and gave some listening. It was nice but not the niceness of that result was something that very impressed me.

What very impressed me was the fact that I was such an idiot and absolutely voluntary deceived myself for a year. I am taking about the MiniMe Bass. I admit that I never meant to get MiniMe sound to any level of seriousness but playing the very same MiniMe with full-blow Macondo bass I suddenly realized that it turned out to vey very nice speaker if I do not use my MiniMe bass section. This little ported (and now with passive radiator) array that I built specifically for MiniMe coast me a lot of efforts and blood and the result might be conceded OK but in a wider scale of the suppressed ego the MiniMe bass  sounds like shit. I kind of accepted this shit as “it was just MiniMe” but using Macondo bass clearly showed that it not suppose to be this way.

The MiniMe bass, with it very sexy G10 enclosure is remarkably comfortable in my view. It is a thin column with 4 X 5” drivers.  One might argue that I am largely ignorant about ports and how to make them to sound “better”. I would not deny it, when those I did played with MiniMe’s post. The best I was able to get was still way out where I would consider is acceptable. Perhabs I used bad drivers or perhaps I have an native hypersensitivity to ported sound (particularly badly implemented) but a few bars of MiniMe placing supported by Macondo sealed bass made me to do the final action.

So, I kicked out the MiniMe original bass arrays out of my room. As a replacement I brought from my storage my old little seals enclosure with a single Scan-speak 21W/8555-00 driver. The 21W/8555 is a little brother of my bellowed 25W/8565-00. (I use 12 x 25W/8565-00 in Macondo array). The 21W/8555 is just 8”, has SD1 motor, magnificent paper cone with very particular Scan-speak suspension (that is hard to call rubber, even it is rubber) and has 20Hz resonance frequency.  The 21W/8555 has the same feeling as 10” 25W /8555 and I am known to be big sucker for those drivers. I do not have a big box for 21W/8555, probably it is 2-3 gallons – 4-6 times less then I would like to have, but it is what it is. So, I brought it from storage and connected it to MiniMe’s MF channel.  That was very nice. The MiniMe’s Utopia TN51 tweeter (that has became the hart of MiniMe) was bit more sensitive but I did calmed it down. The MiniMe’s MF driver is around the 21W/8555 sensitive so it is all nicely balanced. The 21W/8555 bass in the very small enclosure sound a bit “confined” and a bit too fast to my tasted but not frustrating sounding.

I made some test with B-2 driving the new MiniMe arrangement. I took under conservation the changed the MiniMe bass impedance and slightly re-biased the B-2 amps. Now I run it at 75mA and believe or not but loaded to the actual MiniMe I got a first clip at 190W! Considering that I run B-2 behind a voltage deviser that killed 12dB of gain you might understand that I have tremendous amount of power reserved.

With the sealed 21W/8555 bass my respect to MiniMe has revised. I also very pleased how the updated Yamaha B-2 behaves driving MiniMe. It truly has no typical SS nastiness and in fact it sounds much moderated and balance d– it turned out to be a very cool configuration.

Looking behind I have to note that whatever was my initial idea of MiniMe was completely failures. The G10 custom enclosure, the RAAL tweeter and JBL MF driver and 4x5” miniature line- array driver by a cool-running chip amp: nothing is used now and everything go to the storage to join the rest of my failed projects. I would not claim that the MiniMe that I ended up to be has too successful sound but I do like and accept what it is and… that already not too little. 

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