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
"They give you a break in time for these?" This was my first thought too. If you heard them in a store, they probably had a reasonable number of demo hours on them. |
@mozartfan The force of the speaker merry go round is strong 😁 @qwin These are the former top of the line monitors from Ref 3a so they have several years on them. |
I don’t think the basic problem of having poor balance due to insufficient bass will be resolved by changing components. What would really help is to spend about $100 on a measurement mic. and download a free program called REW. This is the only way to remove the guesswork. There is a forum that has a dedicated thread on using REW. It is a very useful tool and can also help you find the best position and set up for the sub you have.
More than 1 sub results in a better distribution of modes. If you take your new found measurement skills 😎 and look at a plot of your speakers in your room you will notice huge peaks and valleys (nulls) instead of a nice ideal flat response. The peaks obscure detail and the nulls rob you of information, this is info containing important parts of the structure of music. It is essentially lost and unfortunately EQ can not bring it back! Adding more subs will result in many more peaks and partial nulls that serves to smooth the response. The peaks will be lower and the nulls fuller. The more subs the smoother. So try for 3 or 4 and as I explained they do not have to be huge. The REL will reach down low and the additional smoothing-subs will even out the room which you can watch happen on your computer. Using smaller subs will smooth out the low frequencies as well as big expensive subs, they just won’t reach down as low but you will now hear stuff you didn’t know was there. The whole sound is improved and by that I mean the mids and tops with a w-i-d-e sweet spot. If you have some mates with subs see if you can borrow 2 to just test the waters. If you set them up properly I can assure you that you will soon find places to put them, like behind your sofa. There is much to be found on this on the net. Doing this will be the game changer. No amplifier, cables or any tweaks will provide you with what I’ve described.
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