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2 Channel Speaker Placement Need Help

I'm setting up my 2 channel home stereo and am having terrible issues with reflections. Speakers are setup in the living room area of a single bedroom apartment. They are a/d/s/ M-15 Tower speakers with 4 10" bass drivers total. Every possible setup I try yields terribly bad reflections in the room especially in the designated listening position. I am considering lining my walls with some sort of sound/reflection dampening material. Is there any certain brand I should look for? Have any other audiophiles done this and how did it work out for you?

Current setup-
Adcom GCD 575 Cd player
Adcom GFP 555 II preamp Recapped
Adcom GFA 5200 Power amp
a/d/s/ M15 speakers

Thanks for any help!! -Keith
128x128moviemakerkeith
moviemakerkeith's avatar
moviemakerkeith OP
5 posts
 
I will keep that in mind and give it a try. I just tried hooking up an average sony reciever to my adcom preamp and found the results interesting. The SQ of the Sony is lacking, however I could not notice a difference in the midrange and tweeter reflections regardless of where I was in the room. This may just be due to the bad sound quality of the sony, however I was told that mixing bright amps with bright speakers can indeed cause more reflections/bad results. I am thinking of switching the amp to an a/d/s/ PA4 or PQ20 and seeing what results I get as well. My speakers are rated for 325 watts per channel, and are only being pushed with 80 watts per channel in a fairly big room for that amp. Do you think if I ran an appropriate size power amp (adcom gfa 555 or 5500 325 Watts RMS per channel) that it would help my problems as well?
mceljo
1,357 posts
 
While reading your post I had a strange thought. Is there any chance that one of your speakers was ever repaired and connected backwards to the terminals? Try wiring one of them out of phase and see what happens. I did this in college to a neighbor that would run his stereo early on Sunday mornings playing video games. It was on the wall opposite my bed so I took things into my own hands. It almost sounds like you're in the situation that I put him in.

Also, your Washington and Manchester made me think that we were neighbors, but I'm actually on the opposite coast.
tgrisham
1,291 posts
 
Try this method. When all else fails, try a new method:

http://www.hifi.ir/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/master-set.pdf

Good luck and keep trying.
buconero117
2,311 posts
 
As a test of what wall treatments might do, hang some blankets on the walls. This is a cheap way to tell if some improvement will help. If the blankets provide improvement I would go for the real thing. Plenty of information on the site about that.
moviemakerkeith's avatar
moviemakerkeith OP
5 posts
 
I placed the speakers 4 feet from the back wall, and created an equalateral triangle all sides 9 feet apart. That helped dramatically. The bass lacking issue was due to my small adcom GFA 5200. I just tested an NAD THX 218 250 watt per channel power amp that was lent to me from a HiFi audio store and within 5 minutes the right channel was blown! Amp was wired correctly and didn't even push over 100 watts to the speaks. I will also try all your suggestions. Thank you! -Keith
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