In-Room responce measurement with Legacy Focus SE speakers

@amtprod The problem with rooms that size is you start to get into echo problems. That echo gives away the size of the room. You want to hear the acoustics in the recording, not those of your room. You wind up in the wrong venue. The solutions are to break it up with a wall or barrier, a lot of sound absorption and speakers with tightly controlled radiation such as horns, dipoles and line sources. In a room that size I would want to see at least four 15" subwoofers. My room, is 16 feet wide and I use eight 12" subwoofers. Getting out below 30 Hz at volume takes a lot of driver. Speaker specs are very misleading. We do not listen to our systems 1 meter from the speakers and they never mention the room. A speaker is going to sound different depending on the room. Another thing a room that large might benefit from is a line source. A full frequency line source needs to be 32 feet tall or stretch from floor to ceiling. Line source speakers project sound better by an order of magnitude which is why you see them at big concerts. Sound Labs would make you an electrostatic speaker 40 X 118" With four 15" subwoofers you could have one h-ll of a party. 

@mijostyn I agree with you.  To me, his space needs 2 subwoofers (at least at this point it sounds like they do).  Frequency tests show 130hz and lower just drops like a stone.  Example : 1000hz is at -24db, and 80hz is at -44db at the nominal listening levels.  I need to be careful though, father is VERY sensitive to bass and can be irritated instantly if he thinks/feels like it's 'boomy' or loud. I have heard a ton of systems with extremely articulate and impactful bass-you hear the detailed pluck or hit of bass, but you also feel it's impact and weight.  With his system currently, it's just mainly the audible portion of the note/pluck/hit.

However as you and Erik have noted the greater issue is room echo/reverberation/decay and the corresponding impacts on phase and timing of the frequencies.  Like you mentioned, we need to break things up, diffuse and absorb in general (there's nearly nothing in the listening area from the chair to the front wall-just the speakers.  Just monkeying with a handful of panels and some ladders with blankets in key spots against the walls is showing how dominant the echo is in the room, and how it's coloring and even creating a cancelling or veiling of ACTUAL recorded room qualities \ instrument qualities, etc.  He's able to hear at least some improvements, but he's also very sensitive to changes so just easing in on things.

I think I have things calculated and types of panels he should get and install, but I wish there was like a diffusion/absorber kit you could rent to test out!!!!!!!!!!  I want to be sure to preserve the immense sound stage and depth he has, but tame the echo reverb, and "warm things up" so there's more feel and presence to the sound.

@erik_squires Ya just wanna jinx things, don'tcha?!?! 🤣

"Don't be so sure, yet.  You can't hear bass problems because you can't hear bass.  Once the mid-treble issues are dealt with these may become apparent and need to be dealt with separately."

With the minimal panels and other makeshift absorber/diffusers I'm playing with, I won't say there's "bass", but things have at least a little more flesh so I know I'm going in the right direction.  With 2, 12" woofers I would have to think mechanically there is enough umpfh there to make things move (ported enclosures as well).

Ya just wanna jinx things, don'tcha?!?!

Ahem, I'm not the one who declared there were no bass problems... that's exactly when the jinx happened!

Frequency tests show 130hz and lower just drops like a stone.  Example : 1000hz is at -24db, and 80hz is at -44db at the nominal listening levels. 

Well, that does sound bad, but use gated measurements instead of sinusoidal pink noise.  This will exclude the room.  Not sure how REW works, but with OnmiMic I get gated measurements above a certain frequency, and overall below that.  If it really is that bad you should consider heavily treating an area of the wall and pushing the speakers into it to get at least some bass re-inforcement.