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 tony1954

I was curious, so I tried to find some feedback from other owners and this is some of what I found.

"I have decided to sell my Ref 3A Royal Virtuosos as I don't think they quite match my room positioning and I'm not hearing the best from them."

"I have recently obtained a used pair of Royal Virtuosos (full Corian cabinet) with very heavy Sound Anchors stands. The problem is that there is no bass. Drums and acoustic bass are almost completely missing and there is almost nothing below 100 Hz. I have tried both my Welbone 300B amp and a Linn solid state amp, it makes no difference. My source is a new Denon DVD player. The tone in the midrange and treble seems good and the imaging is amazing."

"Hi, A friend of mine had this problem with a pair of the Reference3A L'integra and we went nuts trying to fix it. We finally discovered that the speakers were wired out of phase internally, so we just switched the speaker cables black to red and red to black on only one speaker and that solved the problem! Hope it's something as simple as this."     

It's not much, but it does confirm your experiences somewhat.

There was also one comment about the speakers, saying they weren't sold through dealers, but were sold by "owners". Which I found odd.

 

 

 

"Meanwhile this speaker looks like it could shake the fillings in your teeth loose."

Looks can be deceiving, whether it is speakers or people.

@baylinor 

Adding 4 subs to my small floor standers was the biggest improvement I have made in years. 

It solved most of my low end issues instantly. The rest is tweaking.