2. home-theater
  3. 131084-102448

Newbie - Replacing front speakers & going 5.0! Advice needed :)

Hi everyone,

This is my first post on an AV forum, so please be gentle.

I have come here to get the best from my set up, share my experiences and learn more about audio. I currently have the following which I purchased around 6-9 months ago from Richer Sounds:

  • Front Speakers - Monitor Audio Bronze 2
  • Centre Speaker - Monitor Audio Bronze Centre
  • AV Receiver - Yamaha RX-V481
  • Cable - Chord Company C-Screen
  • Banana Plugs: Cambridge Audio V2
I listened to the Bronze 6's recently and absolutely loved them, they sounded amazing compared to the Bronze 2's. I plan to move by Bronze 2's to the back and use them as my rear speakers so I can get the Bronze 6's for the front and have a 5.0 set up. I don't plan on going 5.1 as I live in a top floor flat, floor standers will provide enough bass.

I enjoy TV, movies & music. I probably care about music quality first, movie quality/experience second. 

I wouldn't mind stretching the budget a little bit and getting a floor stander from the new Monitor Audio Silver 6G range, but my OCD says to get the Bronze 6's so my set up is uniform.

I also wouldn't mind spending a little bit extra on cable/banana plugs if the extra money is worth it for floor standers.

I am fairly new to this and £699 is a fair amount of money to me so I want me make sure I won't have any issues with acoustics, sound reflections, speaker placement, bass, clarity, bottlenecks, surround sound and anything else which I need to consider!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated :)
dan89

Showing 6 responses by auxinput

auxinput
2,921 posts
 

I will have to agree to disagree with Erik here. While many love room correction, I have not had good results with it. I have worked with super high end Dirac Live processors as well as low-cost receivers. In either case, the audio just sounds more natural to me without automated room correction. Manual EQ can be helpful, if you know what you want to do.

Since your primary goal is music sound quality, I will agree with Erik on this point to buy the best speakers you can for left/right. Go for at least the Silver 300 model if you can, which has a dedicated and better voiced midrange (very important for music). The Silver 300 shares the same tweeter as the Bronze series, so voicing will not be that different for anything above 3khz (not as bad as combining two separate speaker manufacturers).

From a Home Theater / Movie standpoint (which is my primary goal), I feel that matching the voicing of the three front speakers (left/center right) is very critical. Matching the surround speakers is not as important here, but it’s a "nice to have". The absolute most important speaker for home theater is the center channel. That’s what I would upgrade first, then follow the left/right upgrades when I could.

auxinput
2,921 posts
 

My opinions in matching front channels are really to make the PERFECT home theater.  I don't even completely have this in my system.

I was previously running B&W HTM2 D2 (with 6" midrange) for center and 805D2 bookshelves (WITHOUT midrange) for left/right.  Since I did not have the dedicated midrange in my left/right, I could definitely hear that the midrange tones in the left/right were not as strong as tones coming out of my center.  This was most prevalent when music from the left/right speakers was accompanying voices from the center channel.  I have recently upgraded to the newer HTM2D3 center channel and it has an even stronger/clearer midrange.  Still, the overall sound is really not bad at all and I am generally happy.

I recommended the Silver 300 as a minimum because of the dedicated midrange and the fact that music is your priority.  I really don't think it will be that bad matching to the Bronze center.  The Bronze center will not have as strong/solid midrange voices obviously, but I don't think it will be bad to listen to at all.  You might sometimes feel that when people talk they sound feint or far away -- this could give you the upgrade bug to get a Silver C350 center (with its dedicated midrange), but you should be fine for now since music is truly your priority.

auxinput
2,921 posts
 
Oh, one thing you could do if you match the Silver 300 with the Bronze midrange is to increase the volume of the center channel by one or two steps in your receiver configuration so that the center channel is "pushing" the vocals a little more to match up with the stronger Silver 300 left/right.
auxinput
2,921 posts
 

Crutchfield has some Silver 8 and Silver 10 speakers for 15% discount plus free freight shipping. These are the previous generation.

The new generation appears to have these improvements:

"The highlight of the new Silver series is a completely new version of the company's iconic gold dome tweeter, which has been fine-tuned in the quest for clearer, smoother and distortion-free highs"

"Technical enhancements to the speakers ‘engine’ include beefed up driver magnets, higher efficiency (8 ohms) and improved voice coils that include the patented DCF (dynamic coupling filter) used in the Platinum Series, resulting in purer sound and better power handling at high (SPL) levels."

auxinput
2,921 posts
 
I'm going to go out on a limb and theorize that it has to do with weight of the driver cone.  The very large woofers (6-1/2" and larger) need to be able to reproduce the very low frequencies.  This means they need to push a lot of air.  The driver cone structure needs to be very strong and that means thickness and weight.  The control/damping of the driver is also affected by the surround.  While the driver cone and magnet could reproduce the midrange frequencies, it is going to be hampered by the weight and structure of the cone (moving mass).  The midrange drivers are designed to be as light as possible with no restrictions on the higher movement frequencies (i.e. between 300 hz and 4000 hz).  The damping of the driver has to be looked at slightly differently as well so that it does not "ring" or break-up in any bad way.
auxinput
2,921 posts
 

Dan - normally you could use the pre-outs on a receiver, but your model RX-V481 does not have pre-outs.  It is actually a pretty low-end receiver.  Like tls49 said, it's rated for 80 watts per channel into 2 channels.  When all channels driven, it can drop to something like 40 watts.  When your doing a HT movie this can become critical because the receiver can start clipping/distorting the sound because the power supply is not large enough to drive the speakers.  This can result in burned out tweeters and damaged voice coils. 

You could do something like this:

https://www.crutchfield.com/p_543ADP12/Russound-ADP-1-2-Speaker-level-to-Line-level-Adapter.html?tp=9070

It's not optimal, but if you really want to continue with your current receiver, it's your only way to add an external amp.  There are cheaper speaker-to-rca convertors, but they are usually limited to 50 watts / channel.  It's up to you.

If you're playing at the level of Monitor Audio Silver, you will probably want to get a more reference receiver or amp anyways. 

This is not the same thing as bi-amping.

More to discover