If that's really a "dedicated" space, those speakers need to be out in the room to breath. Not a answer for everyone, just another option http://www.cardas.com/room_setup_calculators.phpBased on the size of your room they should be around 4-5 feet out from the back wall, 3-4 from the side. I'd get subs in there also. Those small bookshelf speakers need some help. Damping/diffusion to taste. |
Thanks Tablejockey. I've increased distance to side walls to 3ft, and brought them further into the room to just under 3ft to the wall. That's made a significant improvement already. Previously, all components of a track were articulated well, but didn't seem to be gelling as a whole, but that adjustment has brought everything in to focus.
Previously it felt like my brain was working hard trying to make sense of all the disparate, individual instruments and vocals within a track; attempting to turn it in to the song or piece of music I know it should be; it lacked cohesion and consequently any emotion or soul.
Just this adjustment has made a marked difference in that regard, and has also removed some of the bloom I was hearing.
Thanks so much 👍😊 |
OP, very interesting set of parameters. I strongly recommend getting a uMik and downloading REW. The time spent learning the basics of how to measure your room will repay you many-fold. |
Click your name, select Details, you will need to create a new System and then it is easy to upload images. You can also write whatever you want in a description, and also post comments and get comments from others. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 The tried and true methods work all the time and everywhere: to the extent possible, move your speakers and chair around listening for the most even tone or frequency response balance. This will almost always have both the speakers and the chair several feet from any walls. Fine tune this to get the imaging you want. Then, listen. You can use your favorite music, or something like the XLO Test CD which has several tracks that are excellent for this. Once you get past the first two steps- locating for balance first, imaging second - which goes pretty fast, everything from there on in is endless. So don't get too caught up in your room and its imperfections. The best room I was ever in was professionally designed from scratch and the guy has still spent the last 20 years figuring out how to fix all the "problems". |
Thanks Miller Carbon. I've created a "system" just to show the room as it was/is, and it's inherent peculiarities.
Any comments/advice more than welcome.
Thanks again
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That room is fine. The window shades are diffusors. Fireplace too, if you get that big table out of the way. You do not in general want anything between the speakers, and if there is then the bigger and flatter the worse it is. Play around, you will hear what I mean.
Take the speakers off the spikes. This will make it a lot easier to move them around listening for their best location. While you are figuring that out order some Nobsound springs. Unless you want to aim higher then Townshend Pods to replace the spikes. Huge improvement!
You will find if you do this a lot of your "room problems" are really speakers vibrating the floor and walls. Remove this by isolating them on springs and you remove a lot of your "room problems". Remove them even more using damped Townshend Pods or Podiums, so much resonant coloration will be gone you won't believe it. This is way more effective than slapping panels everywhere.
But seriously, remove the spikes. The most valuable thing you can do right now is play around with lots of different layouts. Moving the chair and components is just as important as moving the speakers. The easier you make this the more likely you are to do it. So ditch the spikes.
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I'd push that sofa closer out into the room also, closer to the speakers.
Again, JUST another thing to try. You're too far away from the speakers. I'd start with the equilateral triangle position, based on the speakers new position, with the sofa pushed into the room away from the wall.
Push the sofa back according to ears.
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For the first reflection points, and the radiator behind the speakers, get combination diffusors absorbers. The GIK impression series panels are ideal, and you can get them with feet so they can be stood up without wall mounting. Ideal for putting in front of your radiator and next to the bay.
Get the thickest panels you can behind your head, and don't neglect ceiling panels.
Lastly, if you are lucky enough to use Roon or a preamp with DSP, equalize your speakers so they are similar. Don't attempt a flat curve, attempt an equal curve. Due to the room you'll find some frequencies more prevalent than others.
Then listen and adjust accordingly.
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I'd push that sofa closer out into the room also, closer to the speakers.
Again, JUST another thing to try. You're too far away from the speakers. I'd start with the equilateral triangle position, based on the speakers new position, with the sofa pushed into the room away from the wall. Thanks again tablejockey, I've moved the sofa further in to the room about 10 inches. I'm now 7ft from speakers, which are 6ft apart. This is definitely improving things overall. @millercarbon the Townshend are a little beyond my means. I know they are highly regarded, just out of my reach 😊. I was looking at cheaper alternatives; ie the viablue UFO series. Are these viable to put under my speaker stands (I can't make out from the website if you can add a M8 thread in to the bottom of the stand and into the UFO?) @erik_squires thanks for the advice for the panels; I am looking at GIK panels, and also Blue Frog Audio. Would you recommend panels in the alcoves behind the speakers? Thanks very much everyone, the changes I've been able to implement just this afternoon have improved the sound quality..... Not to mention my mood 😊 Regards Lyndon |
If you have alcoves on one side, but not the other, you might want to use matching absorbers on both sides. This should give you a more uniform reflection field.
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Thanks erik_squires; should these be bass traps/broadband absorbers? |
You might try a diagonal orientation, with the bay window along one of the rear walls rather than one of the front ones. This can angle the first sidewall reflections so that they miss the listening position. And it doesn't need to be a perfect diagonal either - if it is off a little bit, that can help stagger the distances your woofers are from the nearby walls, which in turn can help smooth the bass a little bit.
The closer you are to the speakers, the more the direct sound will dominate over the reverberant sound. This may or may not be an improvement, but is worth experimenting with.
Also experiment with toe-in, perhaps even including criss-crossing the speaker axes slightly in front of you (spread them a bit further apart than normal in that case), as this is a way of manipulating the early reflections.
Floyd Toole used a diagonal configuration in the smaller of his two home listening rooms when he worked for the NRC in Canada, and Roger Sanders routinely uses a diagonal or semi-diagonal configuration in the crappy hotel rooms we have at audio shows.
Duke |
You might try a diagonal orientation, with the bay window along one of the rear walls rather than one of the front ones. This can angle the first sidewall reflections so that they miss the listening position.
Sorry, you lost me there 😊. Please could you elaborate on this, and please don't worry about talking down to me, pretend you're talking to a 6yr old, as that's how I feel with this aspect of hifi 😊 |
"Sorry, you lost me there..."
Let's start with your current configuration. Imagine looking down on your room from above, so that it looks like a square (almost). The speakers are at the top of the square, with the bay window on one side, and the listening position is at the bottom of the square.
Now leave speakers and listening position where they are, and rotate the room itself 45 degrees (so that it is now a diamond instead of a square). Instead of there being a wall behind your listening position, now there is a corner. Likewise there is a corner between and behind the speakers. In practice you may have to scoot your speakers and/or listening position a bit closer to the center of the room for everything to fit.
Now that I think about it, it would probably make sense for the bay window to be along one of the walls beside the speakers, with some skewing of the diagonal (like 40 degrees of rotation instead of 45) if the bay window intrudes too much.
You might want to draw this configuration, and then take a ruler and trace the first reflection paths, with angle of incidence equaling angle of reflection. There will be a first reflection zone on each of the walls to the sides of the listening area. I suggest diffusion or thick absorption in those areas, but if you use absorption, don't make the panels much bigger than they need to be to spot-treat that first reflection, at least at first, as imo too much absorption can suck the life out of the sound. In practice you can find these first reflection zones by placing a mirror on the wall and moving it until you can turn your head and see the tweeter from your listening position.
I'm not sure it would be practical to place acoustic treatment panels along the bay window, and that's why I reconsidered where the bay window should end up.
Duke |
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@millercarbon, THANK YOU for posting that link! I hadn’t seen it before and I REALLY LIKE Steve’s offset diagonal configuration.
Duke
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My pleasure. Seriously. Ineffable. I mean that. Cheers!
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Millercarbon - thanks for the decware link. Interesting paper, but mainly tuned to high volume listening - ? I mean, if you have a fairly large room, and / or turn the volume down, second and third etc reflection points will mean less, won't it?
Interestingly, my German Cara program gives some of the same diagonal configuration (CARA acoustic testing program). You give this program your room size - in my case, 27,2 x 20,0 x 8,5 feet. My room is slightly asymmetrical, it was formerly two rooms, and the back part is 2 feet wider than the front part. Within the program, you can adjust for asymmetry, and then add book cases, sofas and other furniture - pretty neat. It then calculates the ideal position of your speakers.
I tested the Cara asymmetrical setup in my room, it was interesting, but eventually I went back to placing my speakers more conventionally, quite symmetrical, playing from the short 20 feet wall of my room.
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So you think sound changes so much with volume we, what? Need a different room layout for different listening levels? Fascinating. |
I am not sure - what means "fascinating"...I do believe that volume plays a main role, yes.
And in the need for "system within a system" amp - speakers - room integration.
Reflection points will always be present in a room, but their importance will differ. Generally on two dimensions:1 the larger the room, the less important.
2 the lower the volume, the less important. In the dark all cats are grey, etc.
So, if you listen nearfield with low / moderate volume, especially in a medium/large room, what happens directly in front of you, the direct sound from the speakers, will be more important than what you hear from your walls etc in the room. Since the room is mainly "acoustically dead", there is little attempt to play "with" the room (unlike a big speaker system aiming to fill the room with sound). E g in a small desktop speaker system, somewhat comparable to using headphones.
Correct me if I am wrong.
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While we don't normally think of it this way, my understanding is that the audibility (and objectionability, if that's a word) of reflections is somewhat level-dependent. One thought-experiment example would be a grand piano in the kitchen - it would "overload" the room if played loud.
Duke
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@millercarbon wrote "Need a different room layout for different listening levels? Fascinating."
Um, yes, I am dreaming about a mansion with a 75 db listening room, a 85 db room, and then a maxed-out 95 db huge room... : - )
Just joking. I am not in that income class.
But seriously, isn’t this what we are doing, a bit, every day? We adjust the system volume to the room / function of the system. We turn the car system down, so as not to sound too boomy and reverberant. We moderate the sound level in the small room, like our home office, compared to the larger room like our living or listening room. This is, from my thinking, due to avoiding smear and unwanted reflected or reverberant sound.
The larger our room, the better, and the lower the volume, the less pressing the reverberant sound problem becomes.
However, I realize, this thinking may be wrong. Technically, maybe, speakers and drivers should handle their two output components (direct + reverberant sound) in the same way, regardless of volume.
However my layman experience tells me this is not so. A speaker generally "wakes up" when you listen close to the cone. There is almost no reflected sound. It is all direct sound. It is only when you turn up the volume, that reflected sound comes into play. Same thing with headphones.
I wonder if reflected / reverberant sound theory takes this volume factor sufficiently into regard. Maybe Duke at Audiokinesis has a comment?
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