Mlapenta wrote: "I have a terrible room... acoustic zen adagio... I love the zen’s but find the upper mid’s a bit harsh."
Here is what may be going on:
There will be a significant radiation pattern discrepancy between the single 1 5/8" ribbon tweeter and the two 6.5" midwoofers in the crossover region. You’ll have a lot more off-axis energy at the bottom end of the tweeter’s range.
The midwoofers will be beaming (especially in the vertical plane) in the 3 kHz crossover region, while the tweeter’s pattern will be very wide in that region. So off-axis you will have a LOT more energy above 3 kHz than below. The ear is most sensitive in the 3-4 kHz region. I think this excess off-axis energy is reflecting off the room boundaries and "coming back to haunt you".
Imo room treatment may not be the answer because it won’t target that specific frequency range. Absorption which is effective down to 3 kHz will be far more effective at higher frequencies, so the net result may be a bit less harshness but a lot less liveliness.
In my opinion a fairly reverberant room is not necessarily detrimental! For example, I bet an acoustic piano would sound great in your room!
If you have speakers whose off-axis energy is spectrally correct (which is the case for the piano), ime they can sound very good in a room like yours.
There are many ways get the off-axis energy to be spectrally correct. Maggies were suggested, and that’s one way to do it - their backwave energy has the same spectral balance as the front wave. Maggies and other dipole speakers typically image best when you have about five feet (or more if possible) space between them and the wall behind them, so that the backwave bounce arrives after some time delay.
Designs which minimize the radiation pattern discontinuity in the crossover region(s) are imo candidates for your room. Amphion and Gradient and Dutch & Dutch come to mind (and something like this is the approach I use in my designs). If you are into DIY, you might consider PiSpeakers. Also, a three-way or four-way that avoids having major size increments between the drivers covering the mid and high frequency regions can minimize the off-axis discontinuity in the crossover regions.
Some designers deliberately put a dip at the bottom end of the tweeter’s on-axis response to compensate for its increased off-axis energy in this region. Imo such a speaker could also be a candidate for your room, but this is something you can’t tell just by eyeballing the speaker - you’d have to find out about it some other way.
Duke
