New to this. How do I stack my stuff?

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 :)

I have experimented with pulling them out into the room a little but I have to say I could not tell a huge difference. In fact the bass seems better where they are in the picture. But, I will continue to play around with that. They are a load and with the spikes on them I have to lift them straight up and carry them...about 120 pounds each with nothing to grab onto. Oddly, moving my chair a few feet into the rooms seems to expand the soundstage (I'm probably not saying that right but the sound is more "3D"...I think some people say holographic.)

" Oddly, moving my chair a few feet into the rooms seems to expand the soundstage (I'm probably not saying that right but the sound is more "3D"...I think some people say holographic.)"

Makes perfect sense to me. I would keep experimenting with the speaker placement as well. Also love the Bonhoeffer book! 

So, I've been reading various internet articles about speaker placement. All of them say get the speakers out of the corners because they will be too boomy. However, my first impression of this system in a larger room with the speakers out away from the corners and back wall the bass seemed very thin to me. Some sources even said moving speakers closer to the corners can help this perception.

Right now, being very aware of the problem of the bass being too boomy, it perhaps is a touch. More so with some music than others. Led Zep, maybe a little dullness to the bass, R.E.M. Reckoning, Sting's Soul Cages, pretty good. So, I've got some testing to do.

Some articles said take the grills off. That sounded silly to me and why would makers of expensive speakers put grills on them if it were a problem. The truth is I could hear a difference immediately even as I was pulling them away!

boxer12 said:

Makes perfect sense to me. I would keep experimenting with the speaker placement as well. Also love the Bonhoeffer book!

Some sources say the speakers and the listener should make the corners of an equilateral triangle. Moving the chair in a few feet comes close to that.

I have not read the Bonhoeffer biography yet. I have read several of Bonhoeffer's shorter books. I did read the Luther book by the same author and it was very good. Not overly academic.

Everything else failing, Get a bunch of Vibrapod Cones to use under each piece of equipment.  It will help isolate the equipment vibrations from each other and provide a little more distance that just the devices feet.  If it can be done safely, put the cones point up into the feet of the equipment above the cone.

Solid cones might be OK if they can be securely mounted onto the devices to be stacked, especially the device on the bottom.

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

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.

@shadowcat2016- Right on. 
@n80-at the risk of appearing to shill, Jim Smith's book will help.

I’m looking into some of the audio test files, etc. I can move the chair around fairly easily.

I will have to admit that my wife gets more blame than her due. She has been pretty patient with all this and truth be told, at this stage of the hobby (for me) I probably would not be willing to turn the room upside down to accommodate the system even if she didn’t care.

Also, and maybe I’ve said this, this system sounds really good to me and sometimes when I tweak things I can tell there is a difference but would have a hard time telling you if the change was better or not.

I have also made changes and have them sound better listening to one type of music and not as good listening to another type. Whether that is real or not I can’t say..............but I’m not going to be willing to move 120# spiked speakers on carpet when I switch from Zeppeling to Steely Dan. ;-)

whart, I’ll look into the book. Even if there isn’t much I can do or am willing to do, I am still very curious about all this and enjoy learning about 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

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

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 

I respect your opinion about the 6’ run of balanced Transparent cables being audibly fine sounding cables in a given system. I encourage you to think outside of the box regarding a couple possible advantages of swapping out those balanced cables for a longer run of another balanced cable.

A longer run of balanced cables would enable you to move both your CD player and ARC tube preamp away from the speakers. That might provide you with certain sonic advantages about soundstage presentation that George pointed out and reduce noise in both the source and preamp being separated from each other and away from the speakers. Those advantages might offset the loss in perceived sonic qualities in switching from the Transparent balanced cable to a diffrent balanced cable.  

A longer run of balanced cables would enable you and your spouse to place the CD player and preamp where it’s most convenient for your use in the room. 

A star quad audio Canare balanced cable is a decent cable with excellent audio characteristics. HAVE (or others) can custom make these for you. A set of balanced interconnects of decent length is relatively inexpensive (<$100 per pair). 

Here are some links. 
http://store.haveinc.com/default.aspx 
(I can message you specific product page links showing lengths and Neutrik XLR terminations w/ gold contact pins and my contact at HAVE customer service). 

https://www.cs1.net/products/canare/L-4E6S_balanced_audio.htm

I will certainly take this into consideration but locating the components elsewhere is probably going to be a problem even if I had longer cables.

Also, only the cables from the pre-amp to the amp are XLR cables. The cables from the pre-amp to the CD are also Transparent but they are RCA cables.

These Transparent cables are high dollar. Way more than the Canare, even used. Now, I have no idea what that means in terms of actual quality difference and I know there is a never ending debate on the topic of cables. So this question comes to mind: Would moving the amp and CD to a better location in regard to the speakers using presumably lower quality cables provide enough advantage over the higher end cables?

In other words which is better: higher end cables with poor component position or good component position with lesser cables?

shadowcat, sorry to hear about your wife. We've been married 30 years. We lost my mother-in-law 3 years ago and my dad this month and have seen how hard it is for each of their spouses to deal with that loss.

N80. Keep your Transparent RCA cable. It’s perfectly fine. You can easily set up the CD player away from the ARC preamp using the usable length of your RCA cable. I am only referring to swapping in a longer run of the balanced IC between your preamp and power amp. Keeping your power amp near the speakers is also fine. 

“In other words which is better: higher end cables with poor component position or good component position with lesser cables?”

It is the entire system quality that needs to be considered. Eliminating certain distortions like proximal effects of speaker radiation patterns on sources and low-level, noise-sensitive preamps by using a longer run of interconnects can easily trump maintaining those distortions by using a short run of very high quality interconnects. But everything is adjudged by experimentation to discern which sounds better overall. 

Ease of use of your source player and preamp switching/volume functions close by to the seating position of you and your spouse is of secondary importance, but can have an impact on long-term enjoyment of the setup. 

shadowcat, another question. I hear people talking about room treatments and acoustic panels etc. Is the goal to get the room acoustically inert, maybe wrong term, but to minimize any 'echo'?

The whole back wall, behind my listening chair, is fairly heavy curtains. 30 percent of the wall to my left is curtains. The entire floor is carpeted. The wall to my left is rough brick with a window with no curtains and two doors. So there are two large expanses of brick. Would it be beneficial to hang something like Persian style rugs over those expanses of brick?

Believe it or not, this set of speakers is often showcased together with a turntable, exactly as presented in this YouTube video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w40quzYNHA
Not exactly optimal. Lol

Even moving the speakers out from the rear wall a couple feet can help a bit with sound stage. I have mine about 5 feet from the rear wall (it's in a dedicated room), but you don't have to go that far. My chair is positioned at one point of a 8 foot equilateral triangle. BTW you'll love the Bonhoeffer book. It's an inspirational read.    

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

Looking at your photo, my advice is to buy a cheap but solid audio rack to replace that little table in the middle.  The turntable can go on top, and the preamp will have its own shelf.  You will appreciate not having to bend over to operate your pre and turntable, and everything will look nice and tidy.

You can experiment with different feet, etc., but until you can get your speakers away from the walls there is not much point to investing anything more (perhaps digital room correction).

As far as long XLR cables these are a bit expensive but are great quality:
https://www.amazon.com/Canare-L-4E6S-Microphone-Cable-Neutrik/dp/B01HHIW8QG/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&...


I use them in my main system:
https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/5395

Unlike most hi-end cables these were designed by actual engineers.  There are a some cheaper options if you want to experiment but I find that some are not as well built.  Overall , I wouldn't get too hung up on "high end" cables.

Wayne

@wloeb agreed. ☝🏻☝🏻

kahlenz, I have done just that. The amp is too big and heavy for it so it will stay on the floor on the feet I made for it.

As far as speaker position, I spent a lot of time last night moving them around (and I am sore for the effort). There isn't room to move them way out from the side walls but I found a bit of a sweet spot moving them out a ways from the back wall. Any further than that an bass seemed to fall off more than I wanted.

I also used some of the online speaker tests and they were okay. I had my wife listen to them (her hearing is better than mine) and she confirmed. So from the standpoint of speaker position I feel it is optimized as much as reasonably possible.

wloeb, thanks for the link. I may consider this at a later time but for now I'm probably not going to spend any more on this system. For those who don't remember, I more or less inherited this system for free. I am not an audiophile. I got it to replace a low end system that was failing and out of curiosity. So I have nothing in this and am not in pursuit of perfection. I'm mostly working on the easy and inexpensive ways to maximize what I have in the room that I have. I do appreciate all the excellent advice though. It has made a big difference and I'm becoming an audiophile even though I never had the intent to.

From the Urban Dictionary:

audiophilia nervosa

Audiophilia nervosa describes the anxiety resulting from the never-ending quest to obtain the ultimate performance from one's stereo system by means of employing state-of-the-art components, cables, and the use of certain "tweaks."

Although the goal is supposedly to achieve maximum appreciation of the music, those afflicted with this condition are merely obsesed with their electronics.

Sample script:

"Todd had spent well over $100,000 in speakers,monoblock amplifiers, fiber optic cables, Shakti stones, pre-amolifiers, and other equipment and tweaks. And yet he still wasn't convinced that Diana Krall's voice sounded "silky" enough".

"Todd was in deep denial concerning his audiophilia nervosa, and his wife was on the verge of calling a divorce lawyer."

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.

Thanks shadowcat. The first reflection point on my left is curtains. On my right it is a 6x6' expanse of brick behind a large couch. That would be the main area that would need attention.

My wife is not going to go for panels, even decorative ones. But, as mentioned before, I bet she would allow me to hang one of her smaller oriental rugs there and probably on the other similar sized brick area that is closer to my listening chair. They make rods for hanging rugs so that they hang about an inch from the surface of the wall. Probably not optimum sound deadening but probably not bad either.

n80, I agree that you should hang something appropriate for the room's decor.
  My system is in my living room and I have a large tapestry hanging. It's very effective for improving mid and top-end response.

Yep. Tame that brick wall, though the couch will absorb some of the acoustic energy.