Great speaker sounds terrible in my room?


So today I took a ride to demo a set of speakers that has had my interest for quite some time, the Ref 3A Royal Virtuoso. These things are completely overbuilt, top notch parts and built like tombstones, the cabinets are made of Corian and are completely inert. They sounded excellent during the demo. The owner was running them with a beautiful VAC preamp / Pass labs amp and a Moon Dac-streamer. They were on 24” stands and approximately 2ft off the back wall. They sounded superb as expected…I pack em up, take em home. I rig them up…my setup is near field with the speakers 10ft off the front wall and the speakers are 5ft away from my listening position. I fire them up and….shocker. They got nothing. They literally were lost with Zero bass response. I actually thought maybe something was connected wrong…I checked the connections ( more on that in a minute) all good. These are higher efficiency (91db) than my ProAc Response D2’s (88db) yet the Ref 3A’s sounded much lower at my usual listening level. I’m still scratching my head over how this speaker is unable to kick ass. I have decent gear with plenty of firepower (ARC D400MKII amp, Levinson 380s Pre, Denafrips Terminator Dac, Aurender N100SC streamer. I’ve had Sonus Farber Concertino’s, Vienna Acoustics Haydn, KEF 150’s and my ProAcs all set up in the same manner and they all were excellent performers. The one thing that I’m wondering about is the Binding post on the Ref 3A…it uses the Cardas screw down clamp type post that only accepts spades or bare wire. my cables are banana terminated and I was using cheapo adapters. Could this all could be a connection related issue or just a speaker/room mismatch?

Thoughts / comments are much appreciated

 

128x128jl1ny

Showing 4 responses by holmz

If they were from a store sale, call the store. Or return them.

If it was a private sale, then offer the fellow, or woman, a dinner (or something) to help you set them up.
(If they did it once, then there is proof that it worked for them.)

Ten feet from the front wall is way too far! No wonder they appear to lack bass! Try one or two feet instead!

@jasonbourne52 usually I agree with you, but in this case I think that the OP needs to at least consider adding a sub(s).

I base it on this article (page labelled #6 at the bottom and before and after pages.):
 

 

@holmz Good find! Thanks for this.

@jl1ny  (your question may  have helped me more than it is helping you)

I have been though 25% of the papers (adjacent to that link.)

 

I think,,, that the best way to approach the problem is with some shift in perspective  to make it a challenge.

Maybe see if you can demo some subs…, if you read the lin, then you know what I would suggest.

They (subs) work vest in the corners, but the speakers pull out from the wall is better for imaging.

And we put speakers near that wall to reinforce the bass…

So a multi purpose room is a challenge, but there may be a lot of existing work that can guide us.

Approaching it as an engineering challenge is different perspective, than it being solely a problem. And likely brings a better mindset for opening up the solution space.

Try downloading a copy of REW (Room Equalization Wizard), select the Room Simulation tab and enter your room dimensions. You can then move speaker and listening positions in the resulting diagram (you can do more, e.g. change surface absorptions, but this is the basic capability) and see the simulated frequency response up to 200 Hz.

Very educational and a lot easier than actually rearranging the room...

While I generally agree, in the case of the OP, they have few choices.

Secondly most speakers image better when the early reflection are more delayed.

I think going by ear is their best method for getting the speakers in a good place, but that will do nothing for bass if they do not couple to the wall.

So the only option remaining is a subwoofer, and at that point the REW makes sense.
With the difficulty in getting subs to play with music, and being a bit biased towards Vandys, I know what approaches I would be considering. The new ones are supposedly very good, and the older models will likely be appearing, and they are good too.

but I totally agree that a measurement is a more optimal way to convey the problem with the sound. And that the sketch the OP provided an improved way to convey the room constraints.