Thoughts on Speakers for a Small Audio/Video Room

If the speaker is too big for your room, overloading your room, etc, it means any car stereo you ever heard in life in that tiny space called a car cabin should have had overwhelming bass, chestiness, congestion, etc. But, that was not the case in the tiny space called the car, right?

I bet you must have some great car audio going on with the Von Sweikerts in your Porsche.  

@ronboco My thought is that my room isn't ideal to start with, because it's smaller than the minimum volume I've read is required for a dedicated audio room.  Some people's stance is "if you can't meet that minimum volume, don't bother, it's never going to sound great".  But it's all I have, so I'm trying to make the best out of it, knowing I'm dual purposing the room (TV/Atmos and audio), loading all my media and spare gear in it, etc, so I'm consuming more room volume by having everything in there.  So it aggravates an already problematic starting point.

If I had a large enough room with the potential to be made great, I could see myself investing $ into some professional acoustic consulting.  But as it stands, I'm not sure what would likely be high hundreds to low thousands in investment with a professional acoustics company (consulting time, purchasing their custom solutions, etc) is really the right thing for a space that isn't ideal to begin with.  

It's possible that a professional company could do significant things to make my current speakers sound great, but if I invest big $ into analysis and custom treatments and it sounds better (but still not great) and it still drives me towards smaller speakers, then I'll honestly feel like I wasted my money.  Because as others have said, the optimal room treatments may be affected by characteristics of the speakers that you're optimizing for.  So I might need to do the analysis again with the new speakers.  I may be wrong, but that's my line of thought.

@gkelly How big are your panels?  Just curious.  

My current feeling is that I should do some basic room treatment (corners, first reflection points if needed, etc) and then try to find speakers that work well in the small space to minimize the remaining issues that need to be addressed and optimized for.

Then the remaining acoustic treatments can be fine tuning to optimize already good sound vs stamping out major issues.

While I suppose it's true that some combination of room optimization via treatments, EQ, etc, can make any given speaker sound pretty good in the room, if the starting point is a speaker that presents fewer fundamental challenges for the space in the first place, the sledding won't be as tough to improve things from there.

@captouch 

I understand your thinking but if you tell Jeff what type of sound you are looking for and send him some pics of the room he will let you know if it possible without charging you anything.I believe this is how he does it. You can ask. So you are out nothing.  If you go with him then you will pay for the design. I don’t know how tall your ceiling is but if it’s 9-10 ft it is about the same volume as my room. I am extremely happy with the sound of my system. Jeff is a no pressure person and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him. 

@ronboco Thanks for the further info, I appreciate it.  It’s a 8’ ceiling unfortunately.  But I’ll keep an open mind on this and won’t eliminate any options without at least weighing against other options.

@captouch  

Your welcome. Your room can definitely sound awesome !