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When is a Listening Room Too Big

I've always considered the interaction of your choosen speaker and the size/type of listening room to be step one in getting the best sound possible. A speaker too big for your room will overload everything and ruin the sound, a small speaker in a really large room might only work well with nearfield listening.

Here's my question; when does a listening room become too large? Lets say you have a nice speaker like a Magnepan 20.7; my current room is 17.5 w x 26 L x 9 h. As I design and build my next dedicated listening room, what dimensions should I aim for? Is 21 w x 31 L x 10 h too big?

Paul Klipsch always said that the best measured rooms typically fall in a range where the width is around 67% of the length...
stickman451
sounds_real_audio
1,012 posts
 

The best sound for me happens when a speaker " loads the room " with sound. The bigger the room the more air must move for that to happen. I not a big fan of large speakers,, ---big speakers big problems---
noromance's avatar
noromance
9,773 posts
 
Um, sell the house and give some money to charity?!
Or but some big Tannoys or better yet Kinoshita RM-7V!
jakegt3
40 posts
 
"Rooms with open floor plans and cathedral ceilings tend to less than optimal for serious listening."

That describes my listening room exactly and I agree that this type of room can be difficult. The cathedral ceilings seem to reflect a lot of sound right back at my listening position in roughly the middle of the room. This tends to muddy up the sound and the imaging. The bass is also rather uneven, with large dips and valleys over the bass frequency range. I have had to add a lot of acoustic treatments around the room (bass traps, acoustic tiles, large sound-absorbent furniture, etc.), which does help a lot. Also I have had to work a lot on speaker and sub placement to minimize the bad effects. It's pretty good now but it took a lot of work to get there and it could still be better.
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