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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

 

jl1ny

Showing 1 response by richopp

richopp
760 posts
 

As most of us keep posting, YOUR ROOM is the most important variable in any sound system.  Otherwise, why would builders hire expensive experts when they build a concert hall?  Just go with the lowest bid and get on with it, right?

I have installed the best speakers (Maggies) in some rooms that will NEVER work for them for a number of reasons that most of you probably have run into over the years--size, shape, placement, furniture, etc. When that happens, either fix the room, IF YOU CAN, move the speakers (DUH!), or buy other speakers.

Like drag racing, once you plug in the numbers, that's the best you are going to do since you can't "beat" physics.  Same with audio.  Once you have done everything possible to fix the issues, you have to move on.  Physics is physics, sorry to say, even in today's "science ain't never done nuttin' for me" world.

Cheers!

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