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New set up in asymmetrical room - speaker placement etc

Hi there,
First time posting here. I'm hoping for some advice on speaker placement/room treatment in my room.

My room is not symmetrical; it is 11ft wide by 12ft long. On one end of the room (lengthways) there is a bay window. The bay doesn't take up the whole width of the room but starts approx 2ft+ from the wall on either side. The bay itself is about 2ft deep and around 6ft wide.

On the wall facing the bay is a large old world cast iron radiator. To the right of this as you face it is the door to the room

On one of the long walls is is a very shallow fire breast which is 5inches deep, so shallow alcoves. The long wall opposite is featureless.

Due to the radiator and door on one short wall and the bay at the other, I have positioned my speakers either side of the firebreast. My listening position (sofa against wall/head about 12 inches from wall with cushions on top of sofa to soften reflections for the moment) is facing the fireplace at the moment about 6ft from the speakers, the speakers are a similar distance apart from one another. They are about 16inches from the back wall, and 33inches from the side walls

The room has been recently repurposed and is now a dedicated hifi room. I have recently got back in to hifi after a 20yr hiatus. I sold all my old gear very many years ago due to other life priorities, so have started again from scratch. So the room and all the equipment are new, and being absolutely bamboozled by all the acoustic information/theory/science, I was hoping to pick your brains for just some "where to start" advice.

Knowing what speakers I have would help 😊; I have a pair of Quad S2 on stands, powered by a Rega Elex-r, sourced by the Bluesound Node (2021 model) and a CDT to the Node's DAC.

I set everything up last Friday and have run the system for about 100+ hrs to burn/break everything in (Radio Paradise left running mostly, with some short listening periods) before looking at serious speaker placement/room treatment etc. I don't have the budget to fully treat the room at the moment, so am just looking for advice on where to start, and advice on what I see as problem areas of the room, and for bass/mid bloom.

  1. The early reflection point for the left speaker will be actually in the bay; on the windows are plantation shutters (open by day, closed at night). I can't imagine what effect the windows/ shutters have on the early reflection point. I imagine the shutters would give some scattering, variable on whether open or shut. Should I use a stand mounted absorber panel where the reflection point would be if the bay were not there and it was one continuous wall? 
  2. For the right speaker, the early reflection point is where the radiator is; again, should I use a stand mount absorber here? 
  3. For the shallow alcoves, should I use bass traps/absorbers? I don't listen to bass heavy music, but nonetheless I'm getting "bloom" I assume from bass and low-mids. 
  4. All walls apart from where the sofa is are bare, so starting with a blank canvas, and probably need to reduce reflections generally, as I do get a little fatigue at the moment. I was thinking absorber panels on the wall behind me/listening position. The wall/firebreast directly in front of me, and the wall above the radiator I was planning on hanging art work to dampen down some of the Echo. Forgot to mention, I have a large wool rug covering most of the floor, which is oak tongue and groove laid on a suspended wooden floor. 
Apologies for the long post, I just wanted to be as detailed as possible. I'll add room photos when I figure out how 😊. 

Thanks very much for reading

Kind regards

Lyndon


128x128painter24
painter24's avatar
painter24 OP
213 posts
 
Thanks erik_squires; should these be bass traps/broadband absorbers? 
audiokinesis
2,722 posts
 
You might try a diagonal orientation, with the bay window along one of the rear walls rather than one of the front ones.  This can angle the first sidewall reflections so that they miss the listening position.  And it doesn't need to be a perfect diagonal either - if it is off a little bit, that can help stagger the distances your woofers are from the nearby walls, which in turn can help smooth the bass a little bit.  

The closer you are to the speakers, the more the direct sound will dominate over the reverberant sound.  This may or may not be an improvement, but is worth experimenting with. 

Also experiment with toe-in, perhaps even including criss-crossing the speaker axes slightly in front of you (spread them a bit further apart than normal in that case), as this is a way of manipulating the early reflections. 

Floyd Toole used a diagonal configuration in the smaller of his two home listening rooms when he worked for the NRC in Canada, and Roger Sanders routinely uses a diagonal or semi-diagonal configuration in the crappy hotel rooms we have at audio shows. 

Duke
painter24's avatar
painter24 OP
213 posts
 
You might try a diagonal orientation, with the bay window along one of the rear walls rather than one of the front ones. This can angle the first sidewall reflections so that they miss the listening position.




Sorry, you lost me there 😊. Please could you elaborate on this, and please don't worry about talking down to me, pretend you're talking to a 6yr old, as that's how I feel with this aspect of hifi 😊
audiokinesis
2,722 posts
 
"Sorry, you lost me there..."  

Let's start with your current configuration.  Imagine looking down on your room from above, so that it looks like a square (almost).   The speakers are at the top of the square, with the bay window on one side, and the listening position is at the bottom of the square.  

Now leave speakers and listening position where they are, and rotate the room itself 45 degrees (so that it is now a diamond instead of a square).  Instead of there being a wall behind your listening position, now there is a corner.  Likewise there is a corner between and behind the speakers.  In practice you may have to scoot your speakers and/or listening position a bit closer to the center of the room for everything to fit. 

Now that I think about it, it would probably make sense for the bay window to be along one of the walls beside the speakers, with some skewing of the diagonal (like 40 degrees of rotation instead of 45) if the bay window intrudes too much.  

You might want to draw this configuration, and then take a ruler and trace the first reflection paths, with angle of incidence equaling angle of reflection.  There will be a first reflection zone on each of the walls to the sides of the listening area.    I suggest diffusion or thick absorption in those areas, but if you use absorption, don't make the panels much bigger than they need to be to spot-treat that first reflection, at least at first, as imo too much absorption can suck the life out of the sound.   In practice you can find these first reflection zones by placing a mirror on the wall and moving it until you can turn your head and see the tweeter from your listening position.

I'm not sure it would be practical to place acoustic treatment panels along the bay window, and that's why I reconsidered where the bay window should end up.  

Duke
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
Steve Decker wrote a piece about diagonal setup https://www.decware.com/paper14.htm
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