New to this. How do I stack my stuff?


I'm new to hifi. I've asked a lot of questions here and some of you may already know my situation but I got the following by chance and for free: Audio Research LS16 tube pre-amp, Arcam CD92 cd player, Madrigal Proceed HPA2 amp. 

It is all up and running and I'm loving it. Now just trying to maximize the little things that I can. For instance, speakers had spike stands but spikes were missing so I made a set.

Now I read in the CD manual that it recommends sorbothane feet and says sound quality will be better.

I'm now figuring out that placement of components is important and that proper stands, expensive ones, are best. Well, expensive stands are not going to happen. But I can try to make accommodations that are cheap and won't turn the room upside down.

Here is how it is all situated now...let the ridicule flow, but keep in mind that I am space limited to a serious extent. Was not sure I'd get the system in my house at all:

The (very) heavy Proceed amp is sitting on a carpeted floor on strips of wood which raise the bottom of it well above the carpet. It is higher above the carpet than it would be above a hard surface just on its own feet.

The CD player is sitting on a small, simple, wooden, antique side table. It is sturdy. The pre-amp is on top of the CD player. I have no idea what this might mean in terms of SQ but the CD player actually puts out a fair amount to heat which rises up into the pre-amp of course. That concerns me.

So other than getting some sorbothane feet for the CD player, what else would be a priority here?

Finally are there issues with which cables contact which cables, how much speaker cables are looped, etc. (Most of the cabling is Transparent Super Bi-wire.)

Thanks for any assistance.
n80
n80..............hmm.......OK, heavy curtains will help attenuate high and some mid frequencies, everything will bounce off the brick, uncovered windows and any other hard, flat surface. Carpet will soak up a bit of the higher frequencies also. None of this will have much if any effect on bass response..............Ok, what's the whole point to the exercise? All rooms, ALL rooms have acoustics issues, even professionally designed rooms, that part is a given. ............Think of it this way. Think of your speakers as flashlights in a very dark room. When they come on, the beams of light are primarily focused forward, towards where they are aimed. However, you also see the entire room light up to varying degrees due to reflected light. Sound from you speakers in essence, does the same thing...................with light, this is usually considered a good thing. The more you can see, the better.

With sound, all that reflected energy is arriving at your ears at slightly different times from a thousand different directions in the room. That confuses your brain because it's trying to sort out all those inputs and make sense out of them. ...........No doubt you've had  or tried to have a conversation with someone in a stairwell or commercial bathroom, were you could hear the voices echo and it made it a bit difficult to understand each other. The very same thing happens in your room..or mine, or anybodies when playing music, only to a more subtle degree.

What we are attempting to do, with room treatment, is to minimize some percentage of those reflections by soaking them up with acoustic panels. This improves the ratio of direct sound from your speakers, to the reflected sound of your room, making it far easier to hear the details of the music.

You'll often hear acoustic panels referred to as bass traps and depending on the particulars of the panel and placement, it will have some effect on bass frequencies, upper bass mostly. Mid range and higher frequencies have much shorter wave lengths and are much easier to soak up. Bass frequencies have very long wave lengths, several feet or more, making them more difficult to soak up with panels, but you CAN have a positive effect on much of it.

To some degree it sounds counter intuitive........to get better sound, you want to soak up sound......to get better bass, you want bass traps to soak up bass................What you're actually trying to do is minimize the REFLECTED sound, allowing you to hear more of the direct sound............Hope this is making some sense. It's late and I'm trying to condense a lot of information into a reasonable space.

No, you do NOT want to make your room "inert"..or dead. Some degree of reflection actually makes the music sound better and more alive, so the point is not to kill off all reflections, just some percentage of them......

How much is enough??? Trial and error is your friend there. In my case, I knew it would make things better, but I wasn't sure how much better or how much treatment I needed, so I built a few panels at a time, installed them and listened to well recorded music before proceeding.......each time the music got cleaner, clearer, the bass got deeper and tighter. I was able to pick out details in the music that I had never even heard before ....to the extent that many familiar recordings sounded so different, it was like I was hearing them for the first time...............that wasn't always good by the way, because it also showcased the difference between a well recorded disc and a poorly recorded one, meaning good music sounded much better, but lesser recordings were somewhat disappointing.


You can reach a point at which the sound begins to go in the wrong direction and sound "dead".....It's hard to describe, but when you hear it you know that maybe you went too far.

In my case I ended up with 22 panels, 3 inches thick, 16 inches wide by 36 inches long..........The more typical dimensions for commercial panels are two feet by two feet or two feet by four feet......My dimensions were based on locally available sizes of rock wool for the panels............Some are on the ceiling, most are straddling the wall-ceiling corners around the room, with a few at specific locations on the walls..........The improvement was quite remarkable.....best money I ever spent in the hobby.

This was a long winded way to squeeze a LOT of info into a short version.....I hope it helps........there are many good articles on all this on line....I tried to condense it..................

Thank you for your condolences.......I miss my wife, very much, every day..............Happy to help if I can. I try to stick as close to factual stuff as possible and keep my opinions to myself .........that just starts arguments. LOL
Looking at your photo, my advice is to buy a cheap but solid audio rack to replace that little table in the middle.  The turntable can go on top, and the preamp will have its own shelf.  You will appreciate not having to bend over to operate your pre and turntable, and everything will look nice and tidy.

You can experiment with different feet, etc., but until you can get your speakers away from the walls there is not much point to investing anything more (perhaps digital room correction).


As far as long XLR cables these are a bit expensive but are great quality:
https://www.amazon.com/Canare-L-4E6S-Microphone-Cable-Neutrik/dp/B01HHIW8QG/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&...


I use them in my main system:
https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/5395

Unlike most hi-end cables these were designed by actual engineers.  There are a some cheaper options if you want to experiment but I find that some are not as well built.  Overall , I wouldn't get too hung up on "high end" cables.

Wayne
kahlenz, I have done just that. The amp is too big and heavy for it so it will stay on the floor on the feet I made for it.

As far as speaker position, I spent a lot of time last night moving them around (and I am sore for the effort). There isn't room to move them way out from the side walls but I found a bit of a sweet spot moving them out a ways from the back wall. Any further than that an bass seemed to fall off more than I wanted.

I also used some of the online speaker tests and they were okay. I had my wife listen to them (her hearing is better than mine) and she confirmed. So from the standpoint of speaker position I feel it is optimized as much as reasonably possible.

wloeb, thanks for the link. I may consider this at a later time but for now I'm probably not going to spend any more on this system. For those who don't remember, I more or less inherited this system for free. I am not an audiophile. I got it to replace a low end system that was failing and out of curiosity. So I have nothing in this and am not in pursuit of perfection. I'm mostly working on the easy and inexpensive ways to maximize what I have in the room that I have. I do appreciate all the excellent advice though. It has made a big difference and I'm becoming an audiophile even though I never had the intent to.