Make speakers disappear. Simple, cheap

 

 

@gdaddy1

You are speaking to an issue that has been near and dear to my heart for a long time .

I’m all about ambiance and setting up the most effective presentation possible.

First, I’m going to reference this  in terms of my home theatre set up.

Around 2009 I had my two channel listening room - which essentially took up our front living room in the house - renovated to do high-performance projection based home theatre duties as well.

And yet at the same time, not only did I want to have a high-quality surround system in the room as well as a mass massive projection screen, I also wanted to maintain a completely separate two channel stereo system to indulge my audiophile whimsies.  So I was looking to balance a number of very difficult things - a room that was for high performance two channel, As well as high performance surrounded Home theatre duties, and yet at the same time it’s in the front main room of our house and I didn’t want it to look like some dark home theatre came.  

I had spent many years in the flatscreen world optimizing the experience of even watching movies on my plasma TV, which involved draping black velvet around the flatscreen, and even creating black masking for Cinemascope movies.  Nobody I know was doing that just for their flatscreen viewing.

And I brought the same obsessiveness to moving up to projection based watching .

I chose an extra large screen on my wall , and I surrounded the screen with black velvet, and I created four way automated black velvet masking so that the screen can take on any shape size for any aspect ratio.  

But the other important move I made  was that… I always found room rooms with a projection screen and left centre right speakers plugged on the floor around the screen to look haphazard and unfinished.  

So I carried out a short black velvet stage area at the bottom of the screen a few feet into the room. (it’s an area board covered with black velvet).  And then I had fitted black velvet covers made for my left centre and right speakers, as well as covering anything else stands, included in black velvet.

And those are placed on that  black velvet stage area.  What does is it makes everything look cohesive around the screen.  And through experiment I had found that ANY visual cues around the screen - including loudspeakers - have an effect on the perception, even if you’re not deliberately paying attention to this distraction of the speakers.  Any reflection from the speakers adds another visual cue of distraction.  So with my set up the speakers in black velvet completely and utterly disappear from view not only when watching movies, but under most lighting conditions. Unless we’re talking about bright daylight coming in most people don’t even know those speakers exist in the room, even though they are fairly large.

And then for the ceiling, we did a bulkhead built down covered and stretched brown filled that looks like a solid ceiling.  The stretch brown felt provides much more light rejection from the screen than any dark paint could manage, preserving contrast on the screen.

Also acoustic material  is strategically placed in parts of the ceiling behind that felt.

And then I hid curtain tracks around the top of the room.  And there are brown velvet drapes that serve both as decoration, and I can also pull those to any points along the wall I want to manage sidewall reflections for my two channel listening.  But also behind those thick brown curtains are thinner, ultra black velvet curtains. 

Those black velvet curtains can be pulled across all the walls in the room, turning the room into a “ Batcave black box” for movie viewing.  In this way, the room just disappears from view leaving a huge screen is just floating in front of you, and also maintaining the highest contrast on the screen as possible.

So this allows me to have a room that looks  much more normal and bright and cheery during the day, but which can at any time be turned into a very high performance Home theatre (7.0 surround… my speakers go low enough. I don’t feel the need for a subwoofer.).

pt 2 next…

OK, so what about the subject of this thread two channel stereo?

I have my stereo speakers pulled well out from the screen wall behind them, into the optimal position for best sound immersion and three dimensional imaging.

I’m not a fan of seeing speaker drivers when I’m listening to music because my mind tends to map the music to those drivers - “ The drum cymbals are coming from those tweezers right there.”

So I have layered lighting in my room, pot lights, and track lights, which I can modulate in different ways.  I have some settings for music which turn off the lights over the loudspeaker themselves, and so they mostly going to darkness.

And the latest generally dim in the room.

What about the idea of black behind the speakers?

Well, I can do this two ways.

In one way I can simply have the black masking of the screen close all the way, which turns the entire wall behind the speakers to a flat layer of black velvet, totally disappearing.

The other way is, I can simply have the layer of lights behind the speakers turned off, and only dim lights over the listening sofa.  And this effectively plunges the area behind the speakers into low light or black.

Both of those are effective, and it can be really neat in terms of imaging.

However, in the end, I’ve simply found that I don’t need to do this.

I actually really like the mood that some coloured light spring to the equation.  And so my typical listening session is with the lights dimmed down low, but with coloured lights on the projection screen behind between the loudspeaker.  Usually, they are doing slow undulations of different colours.  I find this even helps add a sort of biasing effect that makes the sound a bit better.  And I don’t seem to suffer any problem in terms of the sensation of imaging or depth or anything else.  It’s still spectacular.  

For reference here are some photos of the room in action:

 

Here are two photos in daylight where you can actually make out some of the black velvet, covered home theatre speakers.  First shot with my Thiel 2.7 speakers, the following shot with my Joseph audio perspective speakers:

https://i.postimg.cc/j2ym15mt/IMG-3849.webp

https://i.postimg.cc/HnBN1TFF/IMG-3862.webp

 

Wide shot here shows the brown felt covered ceiling bulkhead I described:

https://i.postimg.cc/Px4YKBj2/IMG-1650.jpg

 

Bright shot during the day with lots of light coming in the windows.

The projection screen size behind the speakers is set on “ small” because I like lots of black around the speakers with the lights down.

Otherwise, I can make the screen pretty much the full size of the wall behind the speakers:

https://i.postimg.cc/Y9dV34LQ/IMG-2173.jpg

 

Night listening, image from the listening sofa:

https://i.postimg.cc/T3qMbbyt/IMG-1792.jpg

Alternate view:

https://i.postimg.cc/tgy4HV7h/IMG-1806.jpg

 

And keep things neat and tidy in the listening and Home theatre room, all my two channel and Home theatre sources and amplification are in a separate room:

https://i.postimg.cc/6QzM7DN1/IMG-1352.jpg

 

I hope there’s something in there moderately interesting for some folks .  Peace out!

@gdaddy1

sorry didn’t mean to kill your thread …:/) 

@gdaddy1 

 

 

Glad you got something out of it.

in terms of the Home theatre experience, It’s been about 15 years

And I swear, I pinch myself practically every time I use it.

I cannot believe how amazing the experience is.

As for the position of the speakers :

The front on photo of the Joseph speakers from my listening position is misleading.  The slight wide angle effect causes a distortion to the sides, which makes it look like the speakers are slightly facing outward.

The speakers are in fact  towed in lightly towards listening position. 

(though I don’t like strong toe-in. I find with most speakers imaging gets too tight constricted and artificial sounding).

In terms of the position in the room: 

If you look at the first photo I posted which shows my Thiel speakers from just outside the listening room, you’ll see that there are some space restrictions - the floor standing speakers can’t really go much further back towards the screen wall because then the right speaker is blocking the entranceway into the room.  That’s why you just pulled up close to the edge of the sofa.

However, impractical terms ends up being a non-issue since the position of the speakers pulled out from the wall that much our ideal for me - I get the extremely smooth response and sense of immersion that I’m looking for.  So even without the room issues, the speakers will probably end up exactly where they are in any case.

Instead of sliding the speakers back-and-forth, my listening sofa is on big floor sliders, and therefore I’ve been able to easily slide the sofa back-and-forth within a couple feet to dial in my listening position with respect to the speakers.

As of late I have arrived at a 7 foot listening distance to the Joseph speakers, which are spread about 8 feet apart.

Normally, I have tried to split the difference between the immersion and south stage size I want to experience but also the focus and density of imaging I also want to maintain.  Moving closer to the speakers, slightly trades off image focus and density - moving further slightly trades off immersion for more focus and density.

However, once I started employing a curved diffuser between and behind the loudspeakers that was game changing!  That diffuser adds focus in density to the images, so that I can now sit closer to the speakers with that cinema scope spread between the speakers for immersion, and yet the images in that vast space are really dense, palpable and focussed.

It as close to the best of all worlds that I’ve heard yet in a system.

So I’m very happy.

I also helped things along last year by experimenting with tons of different footers and different materials between my loudspeakers and the carpeted wood floor they sit on.  

I ultimately ended up with a thick granite base, which is a sandwich of granite and sound damping material, with the speakers using iso acoustics Gaia footers on the back, and on the front speaker spikes into hockey pucks to get exactly the front angling I want, and then the granite base is sitting upon four corners of hockey pucks with iso acoustics floor spikes beneath.

The result was a combination of tightening up of the bass, refining the tone and timber, and raising the speakers so that the sound stage creates a more realistic height, and sounds even more vast.