Frustrated with the sound of my system
Spaz you are spot on. And before I get mega flamed again, it's not ONLY the room treatment that I am talking about. You have to start with a decent room. Not a closet, and not an open floor plan with 16 ft. vaulted ceilings. You only need to browse through the virtual systems on this site to view some of the nightmarish listening rooms and speaker placement. Some are better suited for headphone listening, Shakey |
>Given your handle is "Shakeydeal" I think we can all read into your intents. Putting together a perfect room with $300 in gear should do it right? Let's dump all of our money into room tweaks and forget about what we have hooked up, hell the room is 80% of the sound right? What a moron.< I wondered when the name calling would start, what took you so long? To even speculate about a 300.00 system on this site is laughable. But I won't stop you from showing your ignorance once again. Nobody in this thread is advocating a cheap system in a 10K treated room. Use that lump on your shoulders for something other than a hat rack...... Shakey |
I am one of those that believe a room, that is a particular space, regardless of set-up and components can contribute in no small way to poor sound or conversely, great sound. I have personally experienced it and in my particular case tried every possible set-up making wholesale changes to the system including 3 speakers. The final solution? I ended up abandoning the room after my wife and I had a serious talk about rearranging our living space. I do agree about treatments though, they can be taken too far and there are other means to achieve good results including plants, window treatment and furniture placement. First and foremost as Newbee notes is speaker placement relative to listening position and wall boundaries and go from there. Last thing is recommending component changes until it is determined if there is a fundamental problem with the room regardless of set-up. Some rooms just don't work. |
Guys(figuratively), I really appreciate all the lively discussion. I will have the house to myself for the majority of the week, so I will experiment with speaker placement and listening position. There is a wealth of information from you and you are really making me think hard on solving this. I will keep you posted. Any one care to give me a little info on the "Cardas method". |
01-23-12: NewbeeIMO Newbee's suggestion is excellent and is definitely the place to start. You need to get a handle on what your system really sounds like, while minimizing the presence of reverberant energy that undoubtedly comprises a great deal of what you are hearing, particularly given the listening distance and room dimensions you have described. I would suggest that when you do this you try a variety of toe-in angles, including no toe-in. I see that your speakers have been designed to provide essentially ruler-flat frequency response from 45 Hz to 22 kHz, as shown in the graph about 1/3 of the way from the top of this page. That kind of response can be very unforgiving of non-optimal placement, listening position, and room acoustics, and IME can sound hard and excessively bright if not set up optimally. Regards, -- Al |
