Best Speaker for a reflective room ?


Looking for recommendations for speakers for a reflective room.  Open-concept home in Florida - sliding glass door wall, ceramic tile floor, 14 ft ceiling.  approx 20 ft wide x 30 ft long.  Main living room so wife isnt going to allow treatments except a rug on the floor.  Hegel HL590 with hifi rose rs150b.  Budget: $30k.  My system up north has magnepan 1.7s with a sub.  Thank you!

greenngoldcheesehead

Could you get away with something nice on the ceiling? Honestly, a bad room will ruin a lot of things, and I think your nice gear is really wasted. The best suggestion I can think of is to get amplification with room correction, such as the Lyngdorf and then get speakers which suit your general tastes in sound and decor.

Take over an extra bedroom?

 

I would much rather have a small dedicated space that I can control than a big area I cannot. I have heard jaw dropping systems in the size of a large walk in closet… and the great thing is that component costs drop significantly in a small room. Effort and carful choices and you can have a world class system with that $30K or a ok mid-fi system in your big room.

 

Two layers of Cement Board for all walls and ceiling fixes this reflection problem in your room

Your. Est bets are horns, esls and line sources.

The @arion Apollo is in your price range

Your room may be too large, but its description reminded me of this video.

The speakers in the video are listed here on Audiogon.

 

DeKay

 

 

If it were me, for normal listening from various locations in the room, this sounds like a job for Ohm Walsh. These just put the music in the room as if the players were there which is how concert venues work. You might be able to do some things to somewhat improve the room acoustics but eliminating them entirely is likely an exercise in futility.

The other option is to go for nearfield listening  which minimizes the effects of room acoustics.

I doubt the room will ever sound like you hope it will. I have found out that equipment cannot erase room problems no matter how much money is spent. Who knows? Maybe it will sound good.

Thanks for everyone's help.  I know it isn't ideal.  I had tried ohm in my house up north in a room with similar characteristics and an even higher ceiling - they were lost.  I probably needed to go with larger units.  Thanks for the input everyone.  There are a few suggestions I haven't considered yet and will look into them.

With the WAF and other constraints, sounds like a few sets of  headphones and headphone DACs and Amps are in order. 😁

Despite years of really trying anything by Klipsch make my ears bleed, never, ever, put them in a 'bright' room unless you are already deaf above 12 Khz. Interestingly in one of my "bright rooms" omni directional speakers sounded the best, Ohm Walsh, Sonab OA 14's, and similar.  However neither worked well in my primary listening room. I even tried DSP, still no joy with Klipsch. Try even simple room treatment, bean bags, large soft chair, great for listening as well, curtains, artwork without glass, wall hangings, if you can leave the door open, try anything, if it's a bedroom, fill the wardrobe with closed and open the doors, you may just get a surprise.

It’s a rather large room.  Perhaps you can have a relatively near field system using omnis planted near the center of the room.  

Stiffle finish painting on walls. Furnishings, paintings on walls with or without absorption foam hinden. False ceiling there are many options. An acoustic consultant or your reasearch will open many vistas.

I agree with kota1. Black Ice audio preamp and choose a speaker with attributes you like. Call and ask for Jerred at Black Ice audio. Great company to deal with.

@peter_s I agree.  With such a large room, try to arrange some furniture so that you have a smaller listening area where you sit closer to the speakers and have an open space behind your listening position.  

I have a long deep room (14 x 42) with one side about 40 feet of glass, and the other side opening onto a hallway and kitchen with no doors to close.  Large Ohm Walsh pretty much in the corners fill the space with dense, crisp sound.

Typically most speaker manufactures design there products (in their test chamber) to be relatively neutral (with a flat response) or a touch warm (with a slightly descending curve toward the high frequencies). If your room is truly reflective and reverberant you will benefit from having EQ at your disposal to help balance the system a bit but that won't solve the reverb. I suggest looking into a high quality DSP/Room Correction unit. They can compensate, to an extent, for reflections and have almost infinite EQ. . At the last show we did, CAF 2022, we were in a ballroom that measured 35" by 50" by 12". It was too massive to consider passive room treatment. Hard walls, huge room, I had never applied room correction to a room like that. Most people's impression of our system's performance was very positive. The RC unit worked better than I expected. An added benefit to these types of systems is that you can create several optimization curve for different listening and toggle from one to another on the fly.

Controlled dispersion line arrays with DSP/RC would be my suggestion for that room.

The new Gradient Revolution R-5 might be an alternative. Supposedly the Active versions are quite nice. In the standard passive configuration, I have no idea how they would sound with the Hegel, but on paper seems like it could be worth investigating. The nice thing about the Revolution 5 is they are highly adjustable to your room. FWIW....