Great speaker sounds terrible in my room?

@pesky_wabbit 

You ain’t kiddin! If your familiar with Rel settings, my ProAcs are xover 6 clicks and 11 clicks of gain. So far with these Ref 3A’s I had to bump it up to 12 clicks on the xover and 18 on the gain and I’m still not done dialing it in. Seriously anorexic! 
 

@sandthemall  I had them completely wrong. The manufacturer recommended using a speaker to listening distance ratio of 1 to 1.2 with no toe in. So I had to push them away as far as I could and bring them closer together with no toe in. This really made a substantial difference but unfortunately the bass only slightly improved. The manufacturer told me that the best bass response requires 3ft distance off the wall. 
 

@holmz Good find! Thanks for this.

As most of us keep posting, YOUR ROOM is the most important variable in any sound system.  Otherwise, why would builders hire expensive experts when they build a concert hall?  Just go with the lowest bid and get on with it, right?

I have installed the best speakers (Maggies) in some rooms that will NEVER work for them for a number of reasons that most of you probably have run into over the years--size, shape, placement, furniture, etc. When that happens, either fix the room, IF YOU CAN, move the speakers (DUH!), or buy other speakers.

Like drag racing, once you plug in the numbers, that's the best you are going to do since you can't "beat" physics.  Same with audio.  Once you have done everything possible to fix the issues, you have to move on.  Physics is physics, sorry to say, even in today's "science ain't never done nuttin' for me" world.

Cheers!

How big is your room?  Personally, I cannot understand why you would place them 5 feet from the back wall.  You must also have a narrow room.  5 feet apart seems also so close together to create a sound stage.  If you are experiencing a lack of bass, fill in the bass with a pair of good size REL subwoofers.  I have a pair of SHO's and they made a huge difference.

Subs are fine. But you still need to dial in the room. What I’ve found is that when a room is treated well everything improves. Otherwise, you’ll have great bass but still have time smear. Don’t think you have it? Everyone has it to some extent. Get the room right and you get to the point where there’s more coherence than smear...achieving that is like finding tighter focus on a camera lens...you wonder how you ever thought what you were listening to before was even listenable. And, everything from top to bottom improves.

Focus, detail, imaging and bass tightness gets very good. Then you add subs. Or like me, you ditch your subs and just enjoy what you have.

How many times have I heard it and never listened: it’s the room...it’s the room...it’s the room. It took something acoustically profound happening to get me to understand it.