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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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mapman's avatar
mapman
21,928 posts
 

Those are not big speakers. How big is your room compared to room you heard them in.

fiesta75
1,378 posts
 

You absolutely need to hookup the REL. Then they might just blow your mind!

jjss49's avatar
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jjss49
6,612 posts
 

op

seems like you have gotten ample advice, much of it consistent and reinforcing

let us know how it sorts out and whether you get those sweet ref 3a singing right...

chayro
2,936 posts
 

Of course the sub will give you bass, but that’s not a substitute for the speakers sounding close to their full potential on their own. I’m with the op in trying to get them optimized without the sub. Just in a personal note, I’ve never been able to get speakers that didn’t work in my room right off the bat to sound great later. Sometimes you just have to suck it up and bail. It’s not fun when that happens

mapman's avatar
mapman
21,928 posts
 

IF the issue is bass, then closer to walls and corners will help.

 

The dilemma of course is always that closer to walls and/or corners will also likely have a negative effect on soundstage and imaging, especially soundstage depth. If that can’t be worked out to satisfaction then subs are the solution.

 

Also have not researched these speakers and amp specifically, but an impedance mismatch from amp to speakers can also play into otherwise good sounding speakers not sounding good, especially smaller more bass extended ones. I’d check that out as well. My recollection is ref3m are not as efficient always as specs may indicate and more importantly they may not be an easy load to drive which is typically the case with smaller speakers designed for maximum bass extension.

 

Also always avoid early reflections for best soundstage and imaging.

 

That should cover it.

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