Oz
Speakers good for close to wall placement
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- 65 posts total
" I’d like to go with tubes for my amp, so higher efficiency would be best. What are your thoughts on Klipsch Cornwalls?" I would expect the Cornwalls to work very well close to the wall. Their radiation pattern is very well controlled so that interaction with the walls in the midrange and highs would be minimized, and my guess is that their low end would benefit from the boundary reinforcement. You might also look at Pi Speakers. Designer Wayne Parham does superb design work, and in fact he was one of my teachers. Please don’t be put off by PiSpeakers being an "under the radar" brand, I’ve heard them year after year at the Lone Star Audio Fest and they are consistently either the very best sound at the show or one of the top few, and probably always the very best sound-per-dollar a the show. In my opinion. They are designed with wall proximity in mind, and the 3Pi and 4 Pi use a very low-coloration horn that is custom made to Wayne’s specifications. I also make horn speakers, some of which are designed to still give you good soundstage depth even with close-to-the-wall placement. But Pi Speakers offers a wider range of models. Imo they are superb. Duke |
THE LARSEN (6 or 8) gets excellent reviews, and while I haven’t auditioned them I will. The mid and tweeter fire towards each other, and negate much of the first sidewall reflection problems. The woofer fires down (iirc) and makes placement near or against the wall ideal. I’ve spoken to people who have them and love them. The soundstaging they make is more a "wall of sound" with good specificity of location of the musicians, but not as specific and focused as typical front-firing speakers. The upside is that the sweet spot is very broad, and the reproduction is said to be much more like live music. Reviews: https://positive-feedback.com/Issue69/larsen8.htm https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/larsen-model-8-loudspeaker/ "Not to maintain artificial suspense, the Larsen 8s are, like their ancestors, speakers that produce an unusually natural sound, a sound that bears a surprising resemblance to concert music. But, again like their ancestors, they are quite different from ordinary speakers—by intention. So to appreciate them, one needs to think for a moment about certain fundamental matters of speakers in rooms. What Gives With Speakers Designers have, of course, become adept at making these transitions of pattern occur smoothly, and thus sound less troublesome to the ear. But the forward-radiating box out in the room remains an odd creature on the face of it. Larsen Model 8And then there is the question of “free space mounting,” the “out in the room” part. Since bass works better if the speaker is up against a room boundary (or two or three), how did it get to be a habit to put the speaker out in the room—and to have its woofer off the floor, usually? The answer is historically complex. But roughly speaking, you can blame it on the British. Free space mounting makes it easiest to avoid boundary-induced coloration of the midrange, and the midrange was most of what the British audio establishment of the 1960s and 1970s was interested in. Midrange and precision stereo imaging is also easiest with free space mounting, which delays reflections for a long time." ... Large-scaled music, where the match between room sound and direct sound is a vital matter, especially illustrates the virtues of the Model 8s. Orchestras sound surprisingly like orchestras, with a transparency that goes not just down into the midrange but all the way down. If you wanted to write down the bass and cello parts of a symphonic composition from listening, these speakers would make it easy. At the same time, the human voice is also very convincing. A good recording of a person speaking sounds startlingly like a real person, something that often escapes speakers that change directivity in the midrange on account of the baffle step. And instruments with serious lower-midrange content sound unusually convincing, as noted. The Larsen Model 8 is to my
mind a speaker that everyone seriously interested in audio ought to
listen to and at as much length as possible, since one needs to adjust
to its quite different approach to reproducing sound in rooms. There are
things it does, and important things at that, that to my mind lie at
the heart of actually sounding like live music. The approach is entirely
different from the near-field, directional speakers that can also claim
a really accurate reproduction of what is on the recordings, albeit in a
different way. But the approach of the Larsen Model 8s has validity of
its own. How speakers should work in rooms is not a very standardized
matter. But the way of the Larsens is one of the ways that works. The
Larsens, most impressively, really sound the way music actually does
sound. The Model 8s are not just another try at making a speaker like
all the rest except better, as so many high-end speakers are. Rather,
the Larsen Model 8s are something special in their own right." ### |
- 65 posts total