speaker suggestion


I moved from my NYC apartment to a much larger home. My speakers are audio physic sparks. They sounded great in my small apartment but they only sound OK in my new home. The new room is large....the wall the speakers are on is 20 ft wide by 25 ft deep with large windows and hardwood floors. The speakers can only be around 18 inches from the wall and 7.5 feet apart. The bass is gone and there is no soundstage. Are there better speakers for this application......or is there no real correction because of the poor room config. In short, should I just be happy with what I have instead of spending money trying to fix a prob that can't be fixed.
csmithbarc
The bass probably is a symptom of the room. Below 200hz or so, the room is a big part of the bass you hear. Your old room probably had some beneficial room 'gain'. That's mostly gone now because the room got much larger. Before dumping your current speakers you may want to consider integrating a quality sub. If that's not an option, and you truly want more bass, you probably need to find new speakers. (You could try moving your current speakers closer to the back wall. The closer you get, the more bass you'll get. That should augment the bass a bit, but might mess up your soundstage and imaging even worse - then again, can't hurt to try.)

As for the soundstage, it's probably the room that needs some treatment. You might want to try some floor treatment in front of the speakers - ie, a rug if not already there. Also something on the wall between the speakers. Curtains in front of the windows and some additional absortive items like soft furniture and wall hangings will likely help as well. Of course now you have to work closely with the "interior decorator" and your ideas may not fly with her. . . . :-)
I've got Sparks in a largish room also, but added an ACI Force sub, and the bass is killer now, plenty of gusto to pressurize a bigger room like yours. This particular sub mates beautifully with these quick little speakers. The soundstaging may always suffer that close to room boundaries, luckily my wife dosen't mind that my mains are in the middle of the basement. You gotta get them out into the room a little more if at all possible.
hope this helps. -Fish
The Sparks are a bit small for that room but that shouldn't be a major problem. I suspect the real issue is acoustics and that the room needs some attention/treatment to fix that.

Kal