2. speakers
  3. 174806-149763

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 2 responses by larryi

larryi
3,757 posts
 

Each speaker has a different ideal location, so you have to experiment. The comparison is between each pair at their respective ideal location.  If you use an experimental method, like the “Sumiko” method, you will be able to find many different locations where bass will be good. Sometimes a change in location of one speaker by as little as an inch will effect a huge change.  I would bet that you could find decent bass fairly close to the spots where your speakers are currently located if you use this method.  You could have located your speakers, by chance, in a node where certain critical bass frequencies reflecting around the room are cancelling.

larryi
3,757 posts
 

I liked the sound of the ProAc DB2 and DB3s I've heard at a dealership.  They  do a very good job of faking their bass response-elevated upper bass to make the speaker sound fuller and rich in bass.  If that is the case, I don't know what you can do to replicate this effect with speakers that are balanced differently.  I have not worked much with equalization, but that might be the trick.

I can only suggest a lot of experimentation with the location of the speaker and location of your listening chair.  Moving toward boundaries (walls) might help, as would any movement that takes the speaker out of a cancellation node.

It might well be the case of the wrong speaker for your particular setup, which means it is not a fault of the speaker, but just bad luck for you since you heard them work well in a different setting. I am not a fan of subwoofers, but that might be an option in your case, particularly ones that offer enough equalization choices. I doubt that any changes to electronics would effect enough of a change in basic tonal balance such that it makes sense going down that rabbit hole.

More to discover