Have you gotten great sound in a small er room?

Gbmcleod wrote,

"Geoffkait, just happened to be looking at old threads, and saw your response from 3 years ago, and laughed."

One naturally assumes you were laughing with me.

cheers,

G. Kait

Use small bookshelf (the smaller the better), aim it right at your ears. It’s actually easy to make it sound good in a small room.

I've gotten what I consider to be very good sound in a smaller room, but I have found that I had to try several different speakers, as some just wouldn't work, I believe due to bass cancellation.  As everyone with a small room knows, the placement options against the long wall are somewhat limited.  Yes, you can move the speakers back and forth a foot or so, but that's about it.  For reasons I will just chalk up to sheer luck, the Totem Forests and Hawks, and Harbeth Monitor 30's, all speakers I really wanted to love, were bad matches for my room and it seemed that the bass from 100hz down was significantly attenuated.  OTOH, the Opera Callas Monitors and my Trenner and Friedl Pharoahs positively bloomed in the room, with a very balanced frequency response.  So for me, it was a matter of luck.  IMO, once you get speakers that work, the rest falls into place more easily. 

In a small room early reflections and slap echoes will be louder than for large rooms all things being equal since the acoustic waves don't have as far to travel; consequently I operate on the assumption that smaller rooms require more aggressive acoustic treatment, you know, Tube Traps, Shakti Halographs, tiny little bowl resonators, Mpingo discs, Corner Tunes, diffusers, what have you.

Yes, goeffkait, my laughter is of the happy kind, not the UN-kind, so, of course, I was laughing with you.