Speakers for a “cold” room

Mlapenta wrote: "I have a terrible room... acoustic zen adagio... I love the zen’s but find the upper mid’s a bit harsh."

Here is what may be going on:

There will be a significant radiation pattern discrepancy between the single 1 5/8" ribbon tweeter and the two 6.5" midwoofers in the crossover region. You’ll have a lot more off-axis energy at the bottom end of the tweeter’s range.

The midwoofers will be beaming (especially in the vertical plane) in the 3 kHz crossover region, while the tweeter’s pattern will be very wide in that region. So off-axis you will have a LOT more energy above 3 kHz than below. The ear is most sensitive in the 3-4 kHz region. I think this excess off-axis energy is reflecting off the room boundaries and "coming back to haunt you".

Imo room treatment may not be the answer because it won’t target that specific frequency range. Absorption which is effective down to 3 kHz will be far more effective at higher frequencies, so the net result may be a bit less harshness but a lot less liveliness.

In my opinion a fairly reverberant room is not necessarily detrimental! For example, I bet an acoustic piano would sound great in your room!

If you have speakers whose off-axis energy is spectrally correct (which is the case for the piano), ime they can sound very good in a room like yours.

There are many ways get the off-axis energy to be spectrally correct. Maggies were suggested, and that’s one way to do it - their backwave energy has the same spectral balance as the front wave. Maggies and other dipole speakers typically image best when you have about five feet (or more if possible) space between them and the wall behind them, so that the backwave bounce arrives after some time delay.

Designs which minimize the radiation pattern discontinuity in the crossover region(s) are imo candidates for your room. Amphion and Gradient and Dutch & Dutch come to mind (and something like this is the approach I use in my designs). If you are into DIY, you might consider PiSpeakers. Also, a three-way or four-way that avoids having major size increments between the drivers covering the mid and high frequency regions can minimize the off-axis discontinuity in the crossover regions.

Some designers deliberately put a dip at the bottom end of the tweeter’s on-axis response to compensate for its increased off-axis energy in this region. Imo such a speaker could also be a candidate for your room, but this is something you can’t tell just by eyeballing the speaker - you’d have to find out about it some other way.

Duke

@audiotroy wrote: "Duke an austute summation..."

Thank you!

"... but there is no way to know what is causing his problem with the Addagios."

Perhaps not, but what mlapenta describes (upper-mid harshness) is consistent with excess off-axis energy at the bottom end of the tweeter’s range as heard in an unusually reverberant room. I think there is a very good chance he has correctly identified the problem as a speaker/room interaction issue.

Circling back to "Speakers for a cold room", at the risk of over-generalizing: The more reverberant the room, the greater the role the reverberant field plays, and therefore the more important the off-axis response becomes. Not that this is the only thing that matters, but imo it's one of them.

Audiotroy, you have a wide range of experience in the industry. What are your thoughts on "Speakers for a "cold" room"?

Duke

@audiotroy , thanks for your detailed reply.

"we take a systematic approach which has been honed by having tons of gear incomming and outgoing."

That makes sense. All parts of the chain matter. But I think the place where problems are most likely to arise is the speaker/room interaction, so imo that’s a good place to focus attention. I see speaker + room as a "system within a system". (Actually imo it’s amp + speaker + room = "a system within a system", but this thread isn’t about amps).

To put it another way, some speaker designers build the best speaker they can and then it is up to the user to fix any room interaction issues. That is not my approach. I try to take the room into account from the beginning.

For instance, you mentioned using a bunch of pillows to fix "the hardness that the room was feeding back". I highly doubt the room took smooth reverberant energy and altered its frequency response such that it became "hardness". Imo it is far more likely said "hardness" was already characteristic of the off-axis energy, and the room was reverberant enough for it to became objectionable.

What if the speaker’s off-axis response had been smooth? In that case we’d be in pretty good shape whether the room reflected back a little or a lot of reverberant energy. We wouldn’t need room treatments to fix a problem that originated with the speakers. If we don’t need room treatments to fix the speakers, we can use them to improve imaging and spaciousness and timbre, which would call for a different approach (emphasizing reflection management and/or diffusion rather than absorption).

I am well aware that different rooms sound different, so I build an unusual amount of user-adjustability into my designs, rather than expecting the end user to fix the in-room sound with room treatments and/or equipment changes.

You mentioned using the pile of pillows trick at multiple audio shows. I haven’t needed anything like that to fix the room. A veteran manufacturer who first showed with us a year ago said that ours was the first room he had ever shown in where "we weren’t fighting with the room for the whole show."

So I do respect your systematic approach of taking everything into account. I haven’t described everything I do here but I think mine is a systematic approach as well, just with emphasis on a particularly problematic system-within-the-system.

Duke