@holmz Great site, thanks. Ain't the truth---“The sole objective of the audio industry as a whole is to sell products.”
Great speaker sounds terrible in my room?
So today I took a ride to demo a set of speakers that has had my interest for quite some time, the Ref 3A Royal Virtuoso. These things are completely overbuilt, top notch parts and built like tombstones, the cabinets are made of Corian and are completely inert. They sounded excellent during the demo. The owner was running them with a beautiful VAC preamp / Pass labs amp and a Moon Dac-streamer. They were on 24” stands and approximately 2ft off the back wall. They sounded superb as expected…I pack em up, take em home. I rig them up…my setup is near field with the speakers 10ft off the front wall and the speakers are 5ft away from my listening position. I fire them up and….shocker. They got nothing. They literally were lost with Zero bass response. I actually thought maybe something was connected wrong…I checked the connections ( more on that in a minute) all good. These are higher efficiency (91db) than my ProAc Response D2’s (88db) yet the Ref 3A’s sounded much lower at my usual listening level. I’m still scratching my head over how this speaker is unable to kick ass. I have decent gear with plenty of firepower (ARC D400MKII amp, Levinson 380s Pre, Denafrips Terminator Dac, Aurender N100SC streamer. I’ve had Sonus Farber Concertino’s, Vienna Acoustics Haydn, KEF 150’s and my ProAcs all set up in the same manner and they all were excellent performers. The one thing that I’m wondering about is the Binding post on the Ref 3A…it uses the Cardas screw down clamp type post that only accepts spades or bare wire. my cables are banana terminated and I was using cheapo adapters. Could this all could be a connection related issue or just a speaker/room mismatch?
Thoughts / comments are much appreciated
Showing 3 responses by fleschler
@pinthrift That site is at https://www.earglasses.com Yes, Ear shape does change the sound, here for capturing more sound. Interesting. When I push my curved ears back, sound appears brighter and more detailed. |
@ ishkabibil The manufacturer stated that the best position (probably for bass) is 3 feet from the wall, not 7 or 10 feet. Plus, did the demo pair have 1000s of hours on it and yours is new? Woofers can take 500 hours to break-in. I have a higher end system with a $150,000 custom built listening room where I avoid problems and enhance the sound (bass traps built-into walls with multi-panel activated charcoal filters). Besides the point, which is the location of your speakers, your room layout which doesn't look good to me (rearrange it as suggested) and break-in allowance for the woofers. |