Dunlavy SC-IVa Set up help

9rw: I think that John Dunlavy would agree with my suggestions. The reason that he didn't build the speakers in such a manner probably has more to do with cosmetic appeal ( or lack of it ) and inability to properly package and ship such a product than anything else.

As to your specific short wall installation, 15 foot isn't really all that short of a wall. With that much room, one could very easily get the speakers a good distance apart and still have a couple feet on each side of them.

As to your comments about the speakers not needing "monster amps", that is purely subjective. Having heard these speakers with both "good sized" amps and what most would call an "over-abundance of power", i've always preferred the higher powered installation every time. For that matter, so have the owners of the speakers that i've heard, hence their decision to go that route. Sean
>

Your short wall is simply too little space for this speaker. With the wide horizontal dispersion from this type of array, you're experiencing side wall reflections. This alters the in-room response and tonal balance. Once you reduce the side wall reflections by moving the speakers closer together and / or toeing them in away from the side walls, you've now lost the room reinforcement that the woofers were designed to work with. Now the bass sounds weak and anemic. You're in a lose / lose situation. That's because Dunlavy's weren't designed for short wall placement.

On top of that, these speakers suffer from severe variations in low frequency response from room to room due to the differences in floor to ceiling height. I made a recent post about how to address this problem in this Dunlavy based thread. This solution has a lot of variables to it and you can make it as pretty and / or effective as you like.

If you can't relocate the speakers to the long wall and impliment the type of baffle reinforcement device that i mentioned in that thread, these speakers will never work nearly as well as they could or were designed to in your specific listening area. Properly designed speakers take into account specific room placement in order to achieve optimum results. These are properly designed speakers and they are telling you that the placement / room lay-out isn't optimized for their requirements. Sean
>

The Dunlavy's take into account room response and driver radiation characteristics. Given that Dunlavy placed the woofer at the bottom, which is loaded by the floor, and other woofer at the top, which doesn't have any loading, the output of the woofers isn't symmetrical even though the cabinet is configured that way. This causes one woofer to produce a lot less output at the bottom end than the other. This problem is compounded when there is a greater distance between the top woofer and the ceiling. Since many rooms have varying ceiling heights, bass response from room to room can vary pretty drastically.

By introducing a "sounding board" into the equation and controlling the amount of loading that the top woofer sees by manipulating the size, shape and placement of the sounding board, one can gain much more consistent low frequency output. This is true regardless of the room size and / or floor to ceiling height. This still won't fix a problem with side wall reflections, which an MTM type array is prone towards.

I'm NOT saying that these speakers won't work in a smaller room on a short wall, what i'm saying is that they are best suited to a larger room on a longer wall. So long as you can get them spaced far enough apart AND far enough off of the side walls, it doesn't matter if they are placed on the shorter of the two walls. Calling the Dunlavy's "long wall speakers" simply means that they need room to breath, both between them and on the outsides. If one has a very large room, the short wall might actually be plenty wide enough to achieve optimum performance. Then again, what is "good enough" for some really isn't "optimum" in terms of producing what the speakers really are capable of. Sean
>