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Speaker Distortion or Room Interaction ?

my floor-standing speakers are quite powerful already, and sound very clean up to a certain (fairly loud but not party-loud) volume. BUT past
that, the sound starts becoming increasingly smeared and eventually becomes harsh and unlistenable, probably due to room reflections, but i have no way of measuring speaker-distortion levels like they do in stereophile. my room does
have some reverberation issues, which i've treated with echo-busters to good effect (although the room is still far from "dead"). but this is my living room also, so i really don't want to add any more room treatments. at the same time i've been seriously looking at even bigger speakers for a few years to get more resolution, sonority, and headroom in the low bass dept. in other words, i dream of listening to large-scale works of music at more realistic volume levels with a minimum of distortion. SO, the question is, if i go ahead with an upgrade, am i going to run into the same problem, or possibly even encounter worse room interactions?
or would a larger speaker sound so much better at a more controlled/lower volume level that it would be worth it for that alone? i know what some of you are thinking- build a dedicated listening room, otherwise the dream of recreating beethoven #5 will forever elude me.
french_fries

Showing 2 responses by gregm

gregm
3,415 posts
 
for the $$$ involved with an upgrade, i'd like to get alot closer to that ideal. or do you reach the point i have where you have speakers with 20-20 freq. response and incredible musicality, and just call it a day, forgoing the ability to re-create mahler #8 or handel's messiah
Ahhhh, Mahler 8 (Horenstein perhaps?). Forget it. UNLESS, maybe: a) you dish out giga$ for exquisitely designed and probably large, sensitive (~95db spl 1W/1m) commercial spkrs OR b)you fabricate your own (preferably fm a kit).

Otherwise, you'll not have the sense of scale, you'll hear 2-3 cellos at best, ~10 people in the chorus, about 6 violins, the right side of the orch may be off phase with the left side (i.e. the "upper bass" will lag vs the mids), add lib...

Nothing wrong with all the above; it's just difficult to reproduce a large orchestra -- let alone a huge choir added into the equation. Too much energy, too many instruments, too much dynamic content...
Just think about it: you're asking 4 medium-sized units + a tweet/side to reproduce 100-+500 musicians (Mahler 8).

Re yr original question: it reads (sounds) like you're overdriving yr spkrs. I.e. the spkrs are distorting. Just turn down the volume.
gregm
3,415 posts
 
Shadorne -- the ATC 100 are quite large, and very expensive. They are also active so there go frenchfries' Mark Levs. OTOH they're also good spkrs IMO -- better than the present ones -- but they still won't reproduce the scale of a Mahler 8.
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