Recommend speakers for a large living room

Thank you for providing so much information. I agree that the red circles make sense for your speaker locations.

Apologies in advance for this: What I’m going to suggest is not something that you can buy off-the-shelf, to the best of my knowledge; however I will be speaking from experience.

Speakers with a very wide radiation pattern could provide wide enough coverage, but with an omni you’ll be getting a strong early reflection off the wall behind the speakers. Early reflections tend to degrade clarity and imaging, in particular image depth.

For that off-to-the-side sitting area, a unique problem arises: Even with wide-pattern speakers, the image will be strongly pulled to the near speaker because its output will arrive so much earlier than that of the far speaker.

Imo here is a solution: Imagine a pair of speakers with 180 degree dispersion designed to have their backs up against the wall. The INNER 90 degrees of each speaker (which would cover the living room sitting area) is of a fixed loudness, but the OUTER 90 degrees of each speaker has adjustable loudness. So each speaker would have two arrays of drivers: A fixed-SPL array for the inner 90 degrees, and a variable-SPL array for the outer 90 degrees.

What you would do is, turn down the loudness of the OUTER 90 degrees on each speaker, until you still get a decent soundstage in that off-to-the-side sitting area.

This can work because the ear localizes sound by two mechanisms: Arrival time and intensity. The near speaker will inevitably "win" arrival time, but if we reduce the SPL of the near speaker’s output by the right amount, the far speaker will "win" intensity (loudness) by a comparable margin, and the net result will be an enjoyable instrument spread from well off to the side. The effectiveness of this approach will vary throughout that area, but for everyone in that area it will be better than with conventional speakers whether omni or wide-pattern or whatever.

One beneficial side effect of getting the radiation patterns right for this approach is, we will have very little energy in the midrange and treble regions bouncing off the wall behind the speakers as undesirable early reflections.

Another benefit of the well-controlled radiation patterns is that the reverberant field would have essentially the same spectral balance as the first-arrival sound, so the tonal balance would hold up well throughout the entire space. This may not be the case with speakers whose radiation patterns change significantly, as that skews the spectral balance of the reverberant field, and the farther back you are, the more the reverberant field dominates the perceived tonal balance.

In the centered living room listening area, within the coverage pattern of each speaker’s inner-90-degrees array, each speaker’s outer arrays will just be adding a bit more spectrally-correct, late-onset reverberant energy, which is desirable. So everybody in the room benefits.

(I design speakers and spend time working with radiation patterns to help meet particular requirements, in case it wasn’t obvious.)

Duke

Mcreyn wrote:

"If you were to use the AudioKinesis Swarm system, it uses a single amplifer for each subwoofer. My only concern with using the Audiokinesis would be if it would have enough output capability given the size of your room."

Thank you sir.

And thank you too millercarbon.

Given the size of dpal’s total space and its irregular shape, I would expect the bass to be quite good in there without needing four subs distributed asymmetrically around the room. A distributed multisub system makes a small room behave much more like a large room in the bass region, and dpal already has a large room!

So I don’t think a Swarm-like system would offer as much improvement over two bass sources as would be the case in considerably smaller rooms. When I have done custom systems for similar-sized rooms where aesthetics was a priority, I have just done two large subs.

Imo the sheer size of the dpal’s space calls for a LOT of air-moving capability in order to do low bass at high SPL, so I’d recommend two big subs over my four small ones.

(The Swarm was reviewed by Robert E. Greene of The Absolute Sound in April 2015, and the review is online, in case anyone is interested. It subsequently received several awards from the magazine over several years, most recently this summer, so apparently the concept has a good shelf life.)

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SoundLabs have been suggest a couple of times. Yes they would work very well; it MIGHT even make sense to go with two 90-degree panels per side arrayed to give coverage over 180 degrees, assuming that listening area off to one side is a high priority. But I’d have to do some math to see if that would really make sense.

Disclaimer: I’m a SoundLab dealer.

With MBLs or SoundLabs, I’d suggest diffusion of some sort on the wall behind the speakers so that the early reflections are smeared rather than being strong and distinct ("specular"). I would try to avoid using absorption there because absorption kills shorter wavelengths (high frequencies) more effectively than longer ones, and can thereby degrade the spectral balance of the reverberant field, and in such a large room the reverberant field will dominate the perceived tonal balance throughout most of the room. Both MBLs and SoundLabs do a very good job of creating a spectrally correct reverberant field.

Duke