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 3 responses by jjss49

@jl1ny

room boundary l-f reinforcement is a big deal for dynamic box speakers, especially ones with somewhat limited bass output, so you may need to change your setup significantly to get those ref 3a’s working right... move em closer to the room corners, start at 2 ft like in the store, then fiddle gradually...

op

seems like you have gotten ample advice, much of it consistent and reinforcing

let us know how it sorts out and whether you get those sweet ref 3a singing right...

@rixthetrick

sorry if i was being obtuse

by ’l-f’ -- i simply mean low frequency

------------------------------------------------------------------

to add to the discussion, i would remind the op and others here interested that

a) speaker placement for effective/optimal boundary reinforcement of low frequencies,

b) treating a room to address unwanted resonances/nodes and reflections

c) correctly integrating subwoofer(s)

may be somewhat inter-related but are different things, each with different benefits, solving for different deficiencies