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Filling a Room with Music

I recently acquired some really nice speakers to use in my living room. My living room is not and never will be a "listening" room. It is my wife's room in a traditional/formal house. I have a separate room for my primary system.

I hear a lot about optimizing a listening room for a primary system. Get the speakers away from the wall, get your listening position closer to the speakers, treat reflective surfaces etc. All of these seem to optimize SQ for a single position. With my primary system the sweet spot is quite small.

However, I never hear anybody talk about optimizing sound quality for an entire room that might have multiple people in it sitting in various locations. Is there any resource that addresses basic two channel SQ for a whole room? Does it help to have more speakers than two? How do you manage volume issues for those close to the speakers and those further away?

Or, from an audiophile standpoint is this just a lost cause?

Interested in your thoughts/experience on this.

George


n80

Showing 1 response by nekoaudio

nekoaudio's avatar
nekoaudio
489 posts
 
Given only two speakers, the best you can try to do is aim for a best-effort compromise across multiple listening positions. Someone, or everyone, will experience time- or volume-related inaccuracies.

With more speakers, and signal processing, you have potentially more options and can therefore achieve a better compromise (e.g. Trinnov), but no one has yet produced a system that uses active cancellation to produce multiple sweet spots that do not interfere with each other. Alternatively, you could go with a single "point-source" speaker.

As a thought-experiment, you could have two speakers so far away from the relatively small physical area where all listeners are located, so as to have minimal SPL loss or differences in timing. But that's probably not possible in your home unless your living room is a TARDIS.
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