It’s not fancy, but it’s dirt cheap, quick and solid............cinder block with board shelving between them. You can go wide or straight up depending on your setup.......and wife. You can paint or stain the boards, even paint the block to dress it up for the time being. It will hold anything, even your back-breaker amp. It’s temporary and when you don’t need them anymore you can reuse them for some other project or toss them at very little loss. Don’t cut your cables, one day you’ll need that extra couple feet and have to buy a new set..........Do not stack gear on gear or put them in an enclosed cabinet. Heat kills electronics faster than just about anything, especially that monster amp of yours, they have to be able to breath. Do whatever it takes to get Mamma on board. In the long run having her on your side will make the hobby much more enjoyable for both of you............Take your time, you don’t have to get everything "right" this week............I’ve been playing with my stuff for 45 years, it’s part of the fun of the hobby. |
A 95 pound amp is heavy, but even plywood would support it with 4 feet or spikes or whatever you want. That's less than 25 pounds per corner. 3/4 ply or just about anything else that you wanted to build, butcher block, layered plywood, whatever. It's a small, low, simple platform, so even a scrap of granite counter top from a local shop could work if you could cut it down to size.......really not that difficult with the right tool. ....have fun with this and include your wife in the process when possible. Buy a couple of her favorite CD's and let her see how great they sound on the new gear. Explain to her why you're doing what you're doing and why x-y and z matter......Did that with my wife and it went a long way...........If mamma is happy, you'll be happy. |
I'm a wood worker, not a terribly GOOD one, but I enjoy building things. I recently finished a simple rack for my gear that to all intents resembles a coffee table with a lower shelf. Used 1x3 red oak for legs, triple laminated..glued and screwed, trimmed down on a table saw, 1x3 red oak to trim out and stiffen the 3/4 oak plywood top and bottom shelf. I routed out slots below where the amps sit, just under and the full length of the heat sinks for improved ventilation. Installed LED's beneath the top shelf, just for fun and it looks cool at night. The rack is holding about 175 lbs of gear easily. It's low and solid. Stained and poly'd it and for less than $200 I think it looks great. Of course, I've you had more money and less sense you could drop a few K on an "Uber rack" that might make your gear sound better, but I'm quite happy with the one I built for a few bucks..................Don't beat me up for that one folks, I just think there are better ways to spend my audio budget.........Your money, your choice, ain't personal.
When you get to your built in's just keep in mind ventilation, particularly for amps. My larger amp tends to get quite warm when I crank it even though the rack is open on all sides. I picked up a high end, very quite 120mm cooling fan for around $15, built a little cage for it and set it on top of the amp.......Looks fine and problem solved, amp stays cool no matter how hot the music gets...............Heat and electronics do NOT mix well.
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Not sure what all the fuss about wood is......yes, it's flammable, but if your gear gets THAT hot something is seriously wrong. Probably tens of thousands of wooden stands or wooden shelves being used out there for gear. Never heard of it burning anybodies house down...........Anything CAN happen, but come on guys.....................and jello/spam.........the man is looking for actual advice. At least be courteous enough to respect that. Lots of folks here with great gear and setups, help the guy out. |
Nice!!.....and the walnut blocks great. You'd spend "silly money" for those "tweaks" from a vendor. Definitely gonna need to work on your speaker placement and room treats at some point, lots of good info out there for free......All this stuff takes time amigo.........Nobody gets it right....or even close overnight. Enjoy what you have and the way it sounds now and make improvements as time and money allow. It's a hobby, so by definition it's an ongoing thing that gives you pleasure. Take some time to research things, speaker placement, room acoustics, whatever pops into your head. Keep in mind that much of the hobby is subjective and EVERYBODY has an opinion......occasionally some of them might even be useful :).... Best thing I've found is to be patient and experiment until you like the results. |
N80
OK, gotcha on the speaker placement thing. My room is similar in dimension, but slightly bigger, 14x23, but with low, 7'8" ceiling. My speakers are also set up across the short end of the room, which is actually preferable in many setups, so you're OK there.
Suggestion on placement, measure your room, length and width and divide each by 3 and 5, or even 7. In essence, this divides the room in thirds, fifths and sevenths. These will give you approximate places to place your speakers for better bass, as well as improve most everything else. Depending on your room layout, you can experiment with each position and see where they sound the best.
Now, it doesn't sound like you'll be able to leave them there on a full time basis........wife factor, etc. because they'll be out into the room somewhat and that doesn't always go over well with our "better half". However, once you find a spot that sounds good to you, you can mark it with tape or simply write down the dimensions that worked the best.
For casual listening or when not in use you can keep them stuffed back in the corners as they are now. When you really want to sit back and get into the music, pull them out to the previously noted spots and enjoy. You'll find that it can make a significant difference, for the better, by getting them away from the rear wall and giving them room to breath. Placing them on odd interval spacing isn't the only or necessarily the optimum way to set them up, there are others, but I've found them to be similar mathematically, plus or minus a few inches. Every room is different acoustically, so what I do may not be the best for you and vice versa, but it's a place to start. From there you just experiment and have fun with it.
Moving your speakers around, possibly several times a week, might be inconvenient......and annoying, but if that's your only option, I think you'd find the improvement worth the trouble. Perhaps your wife will appreciate the improvement also and cut you a bit of slack............We all have to make compromises to maintain domestic tranquility :) |
Set up
There are endless "tweaks" out there, some useful, some not. In my experience, the best bang for the buck is a proper set up, meaning you take some time to find out where your speakers will sound best and where your listening chair or couch gives you the best sound. The only thing that made a bigger difference in my case was room treatment, everything else I've done had less impact. Work with the limitations of your room and lifestyle, we all have to do that. There is no perfect room, nor perfect setup, but there are relatively easy and inexpensive ways to make things sound much better. |
n80
Yes, moving your chair away from the rear wall, typically DOES improve the sound for the same reasons that moving the speakers away from the front wall does. It's all about how the sound from your speakers interacts with room boundaries, walls, ceiling, etc........yes, your speakers will seem to have more bass when in or near corners, the corners acting to concentrate and reflect the bass back into the room, but the result is exaggerated low frequencies, not a true reproduction of the music........Something to keep in mind is that when you get used to hearing things a certain way, your brain thinks it's right. When you initially change things, it often doesn't sound "right", even though it's actually better, because it doesn't sound like what you've gotten used to.
My speakers weigh in at 100 pounds each and are spiked also, so yeah can be a PITA to move them. Something I did to alleviate that problem is to make pads for the spikes from 1x4 oak and stuck self adhesive felt furniture strips on the bottom. I have hardwood floors, so it makes it fairly easy to slide them around. Carpet would require a different version, but it could still be done easily enough.
My suggestion, especially since you're just getting into this, is to spend some time googling room acoustics, room treatment and speaker placement. There's a lot to learn, but it's not rocket science once you get the basic concepts. You may find differing opinions on things, but in the general sense they'll be in agreement. Ultimately what and how much you'll be able to do in YOUR room will depend on how the room is laid out, how it's typically used and of course how amenable "mamma" is to your new hobby.
As previously mentioned, EVERYBODY in this hobby has an opinion about what's "best". Take it with a grain of salt because there are a lot of variables between rooms, systems and listening preferences.
The bottom line is that speaker placement does matter significantly, as does listening position, as you've already discovered. What works best in your room will take some time and experimentation to determine...........You're new to the hobby, read as much as you can and there's a ton of free info out there.......Take opinions for what they are, opinions. Some will be useful, some won't......A mediocre system can sound very good when properly set up. A very good system can sound poor when NOT set up properly.....I have a pretty good system, but for years I had it set up poorly due to lifestyle factors. Once I was finally able to set it up optimally in my room the difference was night and day. Made me sad to realize what I'd been missing for so long.
It's a fun hobby that can, but doesn't have to be terribly expensive. You already have a good starting system for essentially free, if I recall. Educate yourself and do what you can to optimize what you have . You can always make improvements as you go along.........It's a hobby, have fun with it |
elizabeth
I am currently my "significant other" also. Sadly, I lost my wife and best friend of 40 years last October. It's been a very difficult time. If there is any upside to it, it is that I have been able to optimize my system and room far better than in prior years. My wife was very patient with my hobby, but there were limits and I respected that.
System is now set up, for the first time, across the short end of the room. Speaker placement is nearly 8 feet, 94 inches from the front wall. Listening chair is roughly an equal distance from the back wall, each 1/3 of the way down the room. Made a huge improvement in the sound right off. I followed that with a rather full-on room treatment, 22 acoustic panels, D-I-Y, spaced around the room. That also made a huge improvement in the sound in all respects.........Can't believe how much better the same gear sounds when I addressed room and set up issues.
Currently have my rack between the speakers simply because my 8 foot set of cables won't allow me to put it off to the side. System is bi-amped, so replacing the cables with a set essentially twice as long to allow for better rack placement will be pricey. Haven't quite talked myself into that yet.
Miss my wife terribly and I'd gladly put everything back where it was or give it away for that matter, to have her back, but at least the music sounds better. |
n80
Take your time, read a lot, educate yourself about the hobby. What you may not be able to do or may not be willing to do may change in a year or five. Life situations as well as where we live seldom remain stagnant forever. At some point you may decide to venture further down this road than seems practical or desirable today. In the mean time you have a pretty decent system to start with and you can always bump things up a notch or two later on, should you choose to do so. |
n80
Not surprising that some music sounds better one way, other music sounds worse. I think what you're hearing is the difference in recording quality between discs. The better your setup the more details you'll hear in each recording.......The downside to that is that when you compare a "good" disc to a bad one, you'll more easily hear the differences.......Better recordings will always benefit from a better setup...........by sounding better :)..........Unfortunately that also means that a lesser recording simply won't sound as good and listening to it will be disappointing........... You can decide for yourself what's more important, having great recordings sound great and tolerating the ones that don't, or keeping a setup where everything sounds more or less the same, but nothing really sounds great...........I've had the same experience myself. I opted for the best setup I can manage to further enjoy great recordings, but it has meant that some music that I liked is now somewhat less enjoyable than it used to be, simply because the short comings of the disc are now far more obvious........everything in life involves trade-offs, even music. |
n80..............hmm.......OK, heavy curtains will help attenuate high and some mid frequencies, everything will bounce off the brick, uncovered windows and any other hard, flat surface. Carpet will soak up a bit of the higher frequencies also. None of this will have much if any effect on bass response..............Ok, what's the whole point to the exercise? All rooms, ALL rooms have acoustics issues, even professionally designed rooms, that part is a given. ............Think of it this way. Think of your speakers as flashlights in a very dark room. When they come on, the beams of light are primarily focused forward, towards where they are aimed. However, you also see the entire room light up to varying degrees due to reflected light. Sound from you speakers in essence, does the same thing...................with light, this is usually considered a good thing. The more you can see, the better.
With sound, all that reflected energy is arriving at your ears at slightly different times from a thousand different directions in the room. That confuses your brain because it's trying to sort out all those inputs and make sense out of them. ...........No doubt you've had or tried to have a conversation with someone in a stairwell or commercial bathroom, were you could hear the voices echo and it made it a bit difficult to understand each other. The very same thing happens in your room..or mine, or anybodies when playing music, only to a more subtle degree.
What we are attempting to do, with room treatment, is to minimize some percentage of those reflections by soaking them up with acoustic panels. This improves the ratio of direct sound from your speakers, to the reflected sound of your room, making it far easier to hear the details of the music.
You'll often hear acoustic panels referred to as bass traps and depending on the particulars of the panel and placement, it will have some effect on bass frequencies, upper bass mostly. Mid range and higher frequencies have much shorter wave lengths and are much easier to soak up. Bass frequencies have very long wave lengths, several feet or more, making them more difficult to soak up with panels, but you CAN have a positive effect on much of it.
To some degree it sounds counter intuitive........to get better sound, you want to soak up sound......to get better bass, you want bass traps to soak up bass................What you're actually trying to do is minimize the REFLECTED sound, allowing you to hear more of the direct sound............Hope this is making some sense. It's late and I'm trying to condense a lot of information into a reasonable space.
No, you do NOT want to make your room "inert"..or dead. Some degree of reflection actually makes the music sound better and more alive, so the point is not to kill off all reflections, just some percentage of them......
How much is enough??? Trial and error is your friend there. In my case, I knew it would make things better, but I wasn't sure how much better or how much treatment I needed, so I built a few panels at a time, installed them and listened to well recorded music before proceeding.......each time the music got cleaner, clearer, the bass got deeper and tighter. I was able to pick out details in the music that I had never even heard before ....to the extent that many familiar recordings sounded so different, it was like I was hearing them for the first time...............that wasn't always good by the way, because it also showcased the difference between a well recorded disc and a poorly recorded one, meaning good music sounded much better, but lesser recordings were somewhat disappointing.
You can reach a point at which the sound begins to go in the wrong direction and sound "dead".....It's hard to describe, but when you hear it you know that maybe you went too far.
In my case I ended up with 22 panels, 3 inches thick, 16 inches wide by 36 inches long..........The more typical dimensions for commercial panels are two feet by two feet or two feet by four feet......My dimensions were based on locally available sizes of rock wool for the panels............Some are on the ceiling, most are straddling the wall-ceiling corners around the room, with a few at specific locations on the walls..........The improvement was quite remarkable.....best money I ever spent in the hobby.
This was a long winded way to squeeze a LOT of info into a short version.....I hope it helps........there are many good articles on all this on line....I tried to condense it..................
Thank you for your condolences.......I miss my wife, very much, every day..............Happy to help if I can. I try to stick as close to factual stuff as possible and keep my opinions to myself .........that just starts arguments. LOL |
n80
Glad that you and your wife are hearing differences, that's the beginning :)
For the sake of ease and simplicity.....my rather involved and lengthy discussion last night on room treatments aside, I would suggest treating only the first reflection points in your room. These will be wherever the sound bounces directly off some flat surface, wall or ceiling to your preferred listening position. Have your wife sit in that spot while you move a mirror around the room walls. Any place where she can see either of your speakers in the mirror is a prime spot for treatment and there will likely only be a handful at most, which makes it fairly simple.......As for the ceiling, I believe that you stated they are fairly high, 10 feet? That's good and makes it a bit less important than the walls. A single panel or possibly two, two feet by two feet, on each side wall somewhere between where you sit and the speakers......the mirror will tell you where.......will make an immediate improvement in what you hear and it's a start to better sound.........If you decide to try this, center the panels at the same height from the floor as the mid range and tweeters in your speakers......I understand that you are not an audiophile, but no one is until they catch the "bug"! LOL
As for any other tweaks, special footers, cables, etc. I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about that at this point, as these are likely to make less difference in what you hear than playing with your set up, as you have done, and perhaps adding a handful of panels to the reflection points I just mentioned...........As for the panels themselves, if you pick an attractive print at the fabric to to cover them, they can actually look pretty nice..........Think of them as framed "wall art", or functional pictures. That's how I described them to the ladies at the fabric store when they asked what I was making, whom I would have quickly lost if I started going into the whole room acoustics thing.
Enjoy. |
