Should you tune room to headphones

Blue,

Good headphone sound is certainly a useful reference.

Different headphones/lines still still tend to have different sound and tonal balance as well. So there is no absolute reference even there.

Room acoustics can certainly be a challenge getting a speaker setup to sound like phones. Phones take the room acoustics out of the equation.

With the bottom ported OHMs, floor construction can have a big effect on how bass sounds in particular. More floor interaction with more resonant types of flooring will be harder to get to sound like phones with no room acoustics.

Lots of ways to tweak a setup in a room, especially if many modular treatments are in use. More or less might be better. Other tweaks as well like speaker placement, toe-in/out.

Sounds like one of those situations where you just keep on tweaking towards the reference sound you like best until you zero in on the target.

I have HiFiMAN HE-400 headphones and their EF-5 tube headphone amp and also the KingSound H3 Electrostatic headphones and their M20 OTL tube headphone amp. Both of these setups give great headphone sound.

That said, the headphones. do not compare to the holographic and precise soundstage I get from my Wavetouch Audio Grand Teton speakers driven by a pair of modified Dignity Audio 8-watt 300B amps. The soundstage this develops is mindblowing and very expansive and layered. It's one of those things that you have to hear to believe. The bass is quite impressive too, but if you want "Dance Hall" bass to shake the walls you will probably need to add subwoofers.

I do have acoustic dampening panels in the room as well as a few homemade Helmholz acoustic diffusers (plus a single Michael Green Room tune).

In your particular room, especially if you have the Ohms on the short wall I would guess you'd have all kinds of problems with room reflections because the Ohms dispersion pattern is very wide. And the closer you'd move them to the rear and side walls the worse the imaging would likely be.

To get to a more headphone-like presentation you would need speakers that are more directional... like the Wavetouch, so that the sound is not echoing off of every inch of wall nook and cranny. All that totally messes up the stereo image if it's not well controlled. With the Ohms you might be able to put some sound absorbing materian inside the grills to the outsides and rear of the drivers. That could help a lot.

But if it was me, I'd do what I already did (above) because I know it works like magic.

Good luck to you!

Also, in my large room 14'x30' with high cathedral ceiling (the small room I mentioned above is 11' x 14'), I have the large VMPS RM40 ribbon hybrid monitors powered by a Rogue Audio Medusa amp.

In that room I have a single room-tune in the right corner behind the speaker. The windows have curtains and there are a few sofas around the room. I get very good imagery in this room too with the speakers angled in toward the listening position and using Lyngdorf's RoomPerfect room correction system. The RM40's are somewhat directional too, which helps.

As I said, the imaging is very good in the large room but I think it is actually more enveloping (like headphones) in the smaller room I talked about in my previous post.

Blue,

Your 5000s have teh 4 3 way level adjustments on each speaker.

Setting room size to small and location to free (for lowest low and mid bass levels) might bring the tonal balance to be more like the Grado phones with less bass. I tend to run my 5s with low bass levels by preference, despite being on solid concrete foundation floor. Too much bass can mask midrange detail and probably be further from the Grado sound.

18" to walls might be a tad close, even with treatments. Of course, if you move them out further, the bass level adjustments on the 5000 can be upped if needed to compensate. Each level on the controls adds/subtracts 3 db to the target frequency range. Very useful for helping adjust to room acoustics and something that cannot be done with most speakers these days.