You don't lack bass, you have too much treble


One of the biggest surprises in audio and acoustics is how damping a room with treatments makes small speakers sound so much bigger.  Yes, you get a broader, deeper soundstage but you also seem to get a lot more bass, more power, more extension!!

What's going on? 

What happened is your room was too bright.  The overall balance was too heavy on the mid and treble so as a result your systems balance was off.

For this reason I often suggest before A'goners start chasing bigger and bigger speakers, that  they think about the room first, add damping and diffusion and then go back to thinking about the bass.

Not saying you don't need a bigger speaker, but that some rooms may never have a big enough speaker in them due to the natural reflective properties.

erik_squires

When you limit reflective sound in any room the sound obviously becomes more localized to the speaker. The speaker gets sonically smaller

@mijostyn 

For the record, I'm not just spouting theory from books or an AI app.  I've heard this work many times.

You are missing almost all the context from the title of the thread and the additional context I added in other messages.  When I say that absorption can make a speaker sound bigger I'm specifically talking about their bass output.   Says so right there:

 

You don't lack bass you have too much treble

The common acoustic absorber has two functions and you are only thinking about one of them, which is about reflections and imaging.  The other function, perhaps the most researched and most important is in providing band-limited absorption to the total energy in a room.  This function is why high end panels have charts of Sabines vs. frequency.   If you can hear how wide and tall your speakers are then you probably need new speakers.

So, now that we've established I'm not actually talking about height, width and depth of your speakers but how much bass they seem to put out (see title of thread, again) you need to consider that most acoustic panels are limited to the mid to treble ranges. 

So, then what happens when you take mid and treble energy out of a room?  You end up with more bass.  It's like taking out the veggies from a stew until you only have the meat left.  Is there less stew?  Sure, but now it's beef stew and that's better than it was before. 

As also mentioned, so before you go that route, this is not the only approach possible.  I mention it to help A'goners consider multiple options.  Since taming coherent reflections is also a good thing, this approach may have multiple benefits.

 

If you treat a room by hardening the walls and removing the carpet, then yes, you can make a speaker sound larger.

Which is the opposite of what I'm recommending, but you do you.

Brightness isn’t just caused by the equation of the speaker’s frequency response to room size and dampening ratio as Erik mentions, but also due to other forms of noise in the chain. This could be found through:

- Poor resonance control in the speakers, rack, and components where vibration induces slurring, peaks, and nulls of certain frequencies. Great resonance control will result in much improved image solidity, making for more audible, impactful bass /and less noise through the rest of the frequency spectrum so sonics are more effortless and easier to discern.

- Jitter and EMI are usual culprits that induce high frequency noise into a system to a point where people find their system to be bright, peaky, piercing, and /or fatiguing. In such case it may be improved by using better components or cables, or introducing technologies or accessories that are designed to lower noise floor.

- Poor speaker and amplifier matching is a common challenge I see my customers and others face. Often times, people think their amps can properly drive a speaker just by looking at the specs. Some speakers require a lot of power, and it’s easy for many that are uninformed to look at the speaker sensitivity to the watts of an amplifier and be done with it. Sometimes they get lucky, but in most times, amplifiers cannot fully handle the impedance set by the speakers. Klipsch are great examples, since I know that while they claim to be of high impedance, many of them actually have an impedance dip in the midbass. Regardless, a few may look at the Klipsch’s sensitivity (say high 90s dB) and nominal impedance (usually 8 Ohm or greater) and believe a low power OTL amp would work well. Well, they’re wrong, as the OTL amp can’t handle the impedance dips, and this further makes Klipsch speakers sound “bullhorn-ish”. Sadly, even many solid state power amplifiers don’t deliver the high current needs to truly drive and control smaller speakers, which tend to be lower in sensitivity and lower in impedance. I’ve in many times guided customers to better amplification that simply wakes the speakers up to the point where no subs or larger speakers are needed.

Case in point, Erik suggests a very good point on treating the room to address and optimize  full-range frequency delivery, but it is one of many ways to address it. The whole system’s performance depends on any and all bottlenecks being addressed to a certain level.

Also, if your stew has too much salt, add more potatoes.  Same Yin-yang balance I'm trying to talk about here.

Mijostyn is correct about target frequency plots taken at the listening position.  You want a smooth response that slopes downward from the midrange thru treble.