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Great speaker sounds terrible in my room?

So today I took a ride to demo a set of speakers that has had my interest for quite some time, the Ref 3A Royal Virtuoso. These things are completely overbuilt, top notch parts and built like tombstones, the cabinets are made of Corian and are completely inert. They sounded excellent during the demo. The owner was running them with a beautiful VAC preamp / Pass labs amp and a Moon Dac-streamer. They were on 24” stands and approximately 2ft off the back wall. They sounded superb as expected…I pack em up, take em home. I rig them up…my setup is near field with the speakers 10ft off the front wall and the speakers are 5ft away from my listening position. I fire them up and….shocker. They got nothing. They literally were lost with Zero bass response. I actually thought maybe something was connected wrong…I checked the connections ( more on that in a minute) all good. These are higher efficiency (91db) than my ProAc Response D2’s (88db) yet the Ref 3A’s sounded much lower at my usual listening level. I’m still scratching my head over how this speaker is unable to kick ass. I have decent gear with plenty of firepower (ARC D400MKII amp, Levinson 380s Pre, Denafrips Terminator Dac, Aurender N100SC streamer. I’ve had Sonus Farber Concertino’s, Vienna Acoustics Haydn, KEF 150’s and my ProAcs all set up in the same manner and they all were excellent performers. The one thing that I’m wondering about is the Binding post on the Ref 3A…it uses the Cardas screw down clamp type post that only accepts spades or bare wire. my cables are banana terminated and I was using cheapo adapters. Could this all could be a connection related issue or just a speaker/room mismatch?

Thoughts / comments are much appreciated

 

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oldhvymec
5,101 posts
 

Beard the speaker stand. Just use a piece of cardboard the width of the speaker all the way to the floor from the bottom of the speaker. I bet that fixes it.

THEN understand what you did and make a real nice looking piece to make permanent. Not all bass drivers are created equal or stands perfect for every speaker either.. The right stand can make or break a stand mount..

You can place them where you want, with a lot better BASS..

Regards

larryi
4,098 posts
 

Each speaker has a different ideal location, so you have to experiment. The comparison is between each pair at their respective ideal location.  If you use an experimental method, like the “Sumiko” method, you will be able to find many different locations where bass will be good. Sometimes a change in location of one speaker by as little as an inch will effect a huge change.  I would bet that you could find decent bass fairly close to the spots where your speakers are currently located if you use this method.  You could have located your speakers, by chance, in a node where certain critical bass frequencies reflecting around the room are cancelling.

yogiboy's avatar
yogiboy
5,756 posts
 

Try reversing the polarity on both speakers and see if that helps!

pesky_wabbit's avatar
pesky_wabbit
1,183 posts
 

Am I correct in understanding that you you went from from a normal listening environment with wall reinforcement to a near field set up?

If so, the situations are bound to sound totally different, and you cannot expect similar results. Moreover, only some speakers sound good near field pulled into the room. You have to decide how you are going to listen and pick your speakers accordingly.

Changing absolute phase, as suggested may help to a certain extent, as your amplifier setup may differ in polarity to the dealers. But you will always find that a certain percentage of your music collection sounds better the other way round anyway. Having a phase reversal switch can come in handy.

yogiboy's avatar
yogiboy
5,756 posts
 

Phase and polarity are not the same thing! Polarity is a function of positive and negative wiring, while phase is a function of time.

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