Sota Big Monitors..

Audiokinesis, I really thank you for your detailed recommendation, I will check deeply Gedlee Summas
I am just curious they will work in my large room? as its white paper explain how well they work in small rooms but
nothing written for large rooms?..

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your kind words.

Okay, the term "small room" as used by Earl Geddes would apply to your room. You see, virtually all studies of acoustics are of "large" rooms - i.e. auditoriums and concert halls. Very few acoustic studies have been done on room sizes likely to be found in a home (one reason is funding). In auditoriums and concert halls, the problems of echo and speech intelligibility are very different from the problems of imaging and tonal balance that we encounter in our home listening rooms.

The larger the room (and/or the farther away you sit from the speakers), the more the "power response" (summed omnidirectional response) dominates the tonal balance. Very close to the loudspeakers (typically less than 6 feet) the direct sound delivers more sound power to your ears than the reverberant sound does, and this is termed "near field listening". As you move farther away (into the "far field"), the reverberant sound delivers progressively more and more of the energy that arrives at your ears, and therefore dominates the tonal balance more and more. So in a large room, uniform power response is a lot more important. This is of course one of the things the Summas do very well.

Time for a flashback. Many years ago as a pround young amateur speaker builder, I confidently volunteered to bring my big home speakers, nicknamed the "Gorillas", for a dance being held in a small gymnasium. The Gorillas were ballpark 93 dB efficient and sported two 15" woofers, a 7" midrange, and a 1" dome on top. They sounded great in my modest-sized listening room, so they ought to sound killer in a really big space, right?? Well, they sounded awful at the dance. I was crushed, devastated, my speaker-building ego bruised and broken almost beyond repair.

I now realize that in the gymnasium the power response was what we were listening to, and the Gorillas had a roller-coaster power response which followed the narrowing and blooming of the radiation pattern up and down the spectrum. Okay this is an extreme example, but the general idea is applicable to home listening rooms, particularly those on the larger side like yours. The greater the relative contribution of the reverberant sound, the more important it is to get it right.

Hope this helps!

Duke

I recently had the opportunity to install Summa's in my way-above-average-sized living room which is also quite reverberant. I found the Summas there to sound slightly different than my much smaller home theater but still quite impressive.

The point that I'd like to make is that small rooms exacerbate many commmon loudspeaker problems and make the choice of speakers more difficult. The larger room is a better place to listen and the improved sound of a good loudspeaker will only sound better. I have found this to be true in my own home.

So when I say that the Summa's were designed for a small room, that simply means that they were designed for a small rooms problems but that does not at all preclude these improvements as being apparent in a big room.

You are welsome to come and hear all of this for yourself. An investment of this sort would warrant an afternnon of listening and perhaps a brief tutorial on acoustics from an expert. I guarantee it would be a trip that you wopuld never forget.