Dedicated listening rooms are a luxury, possible in large houses. Many audiophiles listen in their living rooms, even in rented apartments. Think about that.
You don't lack bass, you have too much treble
One of the biggest surprises in audio and acoustics is how damping a room with treatments makes small speakers sound so much bigger. Yes, you get a broader, deeper soundstage but you also seem to get a lot more bass, more power, more extension!!
What's going on?
What happened is your room was too bright. The overall balance was too heavy on the mid and treble so as a result your systems balance was off.
For this reason I often suggest before A'goners start chasing bigger and bigger speakers, that they think about the room first, add damping and diffusion and then go back to thinking about the bass.
Not saying you don't need a bigger speaker, but that some rooms may never have a big enough speaker in them due to the natural reflective properties.
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@fynnegan Room treatments can be removable and are able to be customized to blend in with the décor if need be. Even a nice thick rug on a bare hard floor can make a difference. I think anyone who loves great sound owes it to themselves to learn about and implement room treatments, you won't believe how much it will improve the sound of your system. |
@fynnegan It is absolutely true that we don't all get to build a room just for our stereo, but I think many of us have at least some options in choosing to treat or add curtains or rugs. My point to this discussion was to inform readers of how the speaker room interaction matters above the bass frequencies so they'd hopefully expand the choices they can make to get better balance. |
@minorl The problem for most audiophiles is they have no idea what they are listening to. They have no reference. The best thing you can do is invest in a usb microphone and an acoustic measurement program. Then when you get a equalizer you will know exactly what to do. If you get a room control system it will do it for you and probably do it better, certainly much faster. Digital processors can also determine launch times and correct delays. ' I do not care for a flat amplitude curve and most people don't either, but the right curve is not far off flat. We have been dealing with target curves for 30 years now and we know what suits most people in residential situations and that is a boost below 100 hz and a slow cut above 1000 Hz so the 20 kHz is down between 6 and 12 dB. This is a good starting point for most systems. The problem is that if you do not have subwoofers the low end boost can really increase distortion in most woofers at volume. Full range drivers are at severe risk. @erik_squires When you limit reflective sound in any room the sound obviously becomes more localized to the speaker. The speaker gets sonically smaller. If you treat a room by hardening the walls and removing the carpet, then yes, you can make a speaker sound larger. That would be an odd approach that few of us would take. My suggestion to you is to put the carpet back down. |
For the record, I'm not just spouting theory from books or an AI app. I've heard this work many times. You are missing almost all the context from the title of the thread and the additional context I added in other messages. When I say that absorption can make a speaker sound bigger I'm specifically talking about their bass output. Says so right there:
The common acoustic absorber has two functions and you are only thinking about one of them, which is about reflections and imaging. The other function, perhaps the most researched and most important is in providing band-limited absorption to the total energy in a room. This function is why high end panels have charts of Sabines vs. frequency. If you can hear how wide and tall your speakers are then you probably need new speakers. So, now that we've established I'm not actually talking about height, width and depth of your speakers but how much bass they seem to put out (see title of thread, again) you need to consider that most acoustic panels are limited to the mid to treble ranges. So, then what happens when you take mid and treble energy out of a room? You end up with more bass. It's like taking out the veggies from a stew until you only have the meat left. Is there less stew? Sure, but now it's beef stew and that's better than it was before. As also mentioned, so before you go that route, this is not the only approach possible. I mention it to help A'goners consider multiple options. Since taming coherent reflections is also a good thing, this approach may have multiple benefits.
Which is the opposite of what I'm recommending, but you do you. |
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