My Home Speakers, My Car, and Me...The Ballad of What's Going Wrong?


Okay, so tell me what's going wrong.

My new dedicated room is 13x12x8. It's small. Bare walls. Hard tile floor. Windows on the front wall.

I have some loaner speakers in there at the moment while my other speakers are on order. Right now I have Dynaudio Focus 340s. They are 7ft apart from one another, 29" from the side walls, and 19" from the front wall. I am sitting 9.5ft from the speakers with a glorious center image.

I have ran room correction via my Linn KDS/3, called "Space Optimization." It works very well.

Yet, here I am listening, and verything I put on gives me anxiety. Literally a vibratory feeling that sucks.It's maybe half of a song in and I'm feeling this way.

And I think to myself, "When I'm in my car, cranking my music, why don't I feel the same?" I feel fine in the car. Perfect, even.

So, why would I be feeling this way in my room?

I question if I naturally need to sit further back from the speakers (which I can't do: I'm out of space/room). It seems my best speaker experiences are when I'm at a friend's house and either I'm a really good distance away from the speakers, or the room is very large and/or the speakers are much further apart. All of this, of course, is contrary to what I experience in my car.

Then I think, well, let me try some near field listening with my speakers, and I end up with the same anxious feeling. 

There's really only one more thing I can try, and that is to move all of my gear into the parlor, which is a much bigger room. I couldn't leave my stuff there, because the wife wouldn't want it, but at least I could experiment to see if a greater distance from the speakers will be better. However, that doesn't answer my question of why I feel fine in my auto with the music blaring in such a confined space.

Could it be that a sealed up listening space, full of soft stuff, is optimal?

Here is a diagram of my room (if it matters).

http://imgur.com/PC8LyVX


Thanks for nay thoughts. It's driving me batty.
evolvist
evolvist -

If you're stuck in the small room, some stand mounted monitors may work better than the floor standers.
I used my old Vandersteen 3A's in a similar situation, without the glass and tile, and the ear fatigue (anxiety) was enormous at any bump of the volume.  I messed with the cables, speaker positioning, curtains and room treatments and that helped some. Not much.  I moved them to a larger room and the only wife acceptable solution was to place them at either ends of the listening couch.  The tone, fidelity,  overall command and Fun of the music so improved that I could not move them back to the small room.  I sacrificed soundstaging for good sound. Definitely give your parlor a try.  
It sounds like your system is out of phase. Try reversing the polarity on one speaker and see if that helps!
room correction software is not omnipotent - I'd buy a $100 calibrated measurement mic and run some free software to test

or... maybe the experience of just sitting in a smallish, bare room w/ or w/o music is the issue

and.. you can always dose up with 'ludes before listening!
I'm going to try out some acoustic treatment tonight. Technically I could pad the whole friggin' room if I wanted to. I have a fair sized rug that I can put between the speakers and myself for now. 

Hopefully this will give me a good idea where I'm headed. 

I'm just thinking that it can't be the loudness, otherwise I would feel strange at concerts or in my ride. I wouldn't think the room would be too small, but maybe it is. 

Anyway, it will be a worthy experiment this evening. 

Have you tried turning off the Linn "Space Optimization" room correction? 

I had the opportunity to work with DiracLive room correction in my system.  It did weird things to the frequency response as well as the phasing.  The result was that the audio sounded like it was right at my head (almost like listening to headphones) instead of far out in front of me.  Sometimes it would cause an effect like one speaker was out of phase (like donvito suggested).  Since you have so much hard wood/wall reflections, the room correction could be over-compensating these reflections and it could affect phase.

In any event, I really tried DiracLive with all sorts of configurations, adjustment levels, mic placement.  In the end, I just did not enjoy the result and found that non-corrected audio just sounded better and more natural.

I'm not saying this is your problem, but it's something you could try.  Maybe in a more treated room, the "Space Optimization" correction could work better?