Upgrade from WIlson Sabrina


I have a small room approx 14'x12'x 8.5' well treated with GIK acoustics panels.  Currently using the Sabrina's (not x).  Considering the Talus from YG acoustics, mainly because it is sealed. and may integrate better. Unfortunately since I am located in India, auditioning is almost next to impossible as dealers only bring in equipment on order - they usually only have the top of the line model for demo.  Would appreciate any feed back.  I love the Sabrina's and the x is a logical choice, but being ported, I am experiencing some room node reinforcements (mitigated somewhat by pulling the speakers forward by 4'), so am considering sealed options. Magico is not sold in India.

TIA - Cheers,

Sid

sidvee

@sidvee

Smaller rooms are tough. I have a bigger speaker in a smallish room too. I think you will find you need more absorption than you think. Jeff at HDacoustics designed my room. He is very good and I would strongly advise a free consultation to see what he thinks. I think your Wilson’s can work just fine in your room. Good luck !!

 

In some ways, the listening position<->back wall is a more important distance than the front wall <-> speaker to create envelopment, immersion etc, which is where your 14ft is very restrictive. But, you are not alone, there are guys with million dollar rigs sitting right up against the backwall.

Try to leave at least 4 ft between you and the back wall, which leaves you barely 10 ft to work with. I suppose you could set your speaker a foot or 2 away from the front wall and play with inter-speaker distance and toe-in.

Standing waves (peaks/nulls) occur between parallel walls. Set your gik floorstanding panels directly in front, behind and to either side of you. Since you are only worried about your primary listening position, you don’t need to throw panels all over the small room for now and consume all room space, as if you are an omnipresent entity listening from every inch of the room. These panels (even the 244) are not good enough though to deal with stuff under 100ish hz or so.

For that, you will need subwoofers. Get 2 KEF KC62 microsubs (since your room’s a bit on the micro side) and place it at the 1/4, 1/4 and 3/4, 3/4 room lengthwise, widthwise positions with a crossover of 80hz or so, as a starting point. Play with the phase and the peaks/nulls under 80 or so hz should disappear (get cancelled). In other words, subs will serve as effective active room treatment devices when set up right. For stuff above that, you’ve got your panels hopefully in the right places.

If you listen to a lot of classical Indian or hindustani music... sarods, sitars, santoors, etc, i.e., these are the type of instruments that typical western speaker designers never heard or don’t quite understand the complexities of...,If that’s the case, you may want to get rid of that Wilson and get a Yamaha NS-2000A, which is a trickle down from the NS5000. It should hopefully fit in your room and also do fine with rock or whatever... If you have more money, get something from Mark Levinson (Daniel Hertz), he’s a sarod player and did some thinking along those lines hopefully, i.e., talk to him first.

Good luck.

 

 

Thanks guys, appreciate the feedback. The rear corners of the room have 244 panels diagonally across with an air gap. Yes the front have panels against the walls, but as remarked above not much room available and the front corners I cannot place any bass traps as there is a door on the left, and the right has a book shelf. Anyways the most potent weapon in my arsenal is the Luxman CL-38uc preamp, which has tone controls with bass adjustable at 150/300/600 hz. Set at 150 and reduced the bass knob slightly, it works like a charm. Agreed purists may scoff but it works very well indeed. 

Cheers,

Sid

 

Another option would be to try a corner setup since your room is almost square