Sonics of Soundlabs

Chris, the longest diagonal of your room is 28 feet (thanks to the 11 foot ceiling height!) and so flat response down to 20 cycles is possible. I think some of the other posts (regarding the phenomenon of "room gain" in smaller rooms) failed to take into account that the speaker you are considering has what Prof. Linkwitz calls a "dipole woofer" which, as he makes very clear on his website, requires the necessary 1/2 wavelength dimension (or more) to produce a given frequency:

Room modes cannot exist when 1/2 of a sound wavelength exceeds the longest room dimension. If this is 7.5 m (24.6 ft), then a wavelength will be 15 m and the lowest mode frequency is 343 m/s / 15 m = 23 Hz. Below this frequency bass response may increase due to room gain, if the woofer is a monopole. For a dipole woofer the response may stay flat or drop off, depending on the rigidity of room surfaces and lack of any openings.

If your listening room were just a little bit smaller, you would definitely be better off with a hybrid speaker (like the Summit) which have monopole woofers which allow the development of "room gain" thus maintaining SPL at lower frequencies in small spaces. Just remember that "room gain" (or "transfer gain as it is sometimes called) is only an important factor when the room is too small to allow formation of the 1/2 wavelength of a given frequency (an automobile interior is probably the extreme case.) At that point, you are no longer in a "listening room" but instead you are in a "secondary speaker enclosure." And if you push that example even further, in other words, reduce the size of the listening room down to zero, you are wearing headphones!

Thanks for all of your posts so far........ 76doublebass, I am only thinking of trying something new (always on the lookout for the holygrail so to speak). It is probably too early to really judge the Soundlabs but, I am thinking you are right; my Prodigy's sound pretty darn good (if not great!) to my ears. After trying Maggies, Dynaudio, etc. etc. the ony speakers that I have heard that I like better are the WP7's and they're out of reach money wise. Again it does all come down to personal preferences......... Still I'm pretty curious about these SL monsters after all of the good things I've heard.

If it's not too late...Suggest you listen to Eminent Technology LFT-8A's. If you like the way one pair sounds, you could do as I did - run them "stacked" or twin pairs, all biamped. Phenomenal soundstage, detail, slam, you name it...

Boy you really don't get it!!!!! There are no standing waves below the lowest nodal frequency. Period, it doesn't matter what type of tranducer you are using. Also, you don't measure the diagonal of the room, you measure the longest distance between two walls. Nodes and suckout are caused by reflections of parallel walls, one reason you will see that studios use stacked or even angled walls is to spread out these modal frequencies.

Read and re-read the quote you posted (as apparently you know believe in room gain since Linquist addresses the subject). It clearly states "Room modes cannot exist when 1/2 of a sound wavelength exceeds the longest room dimension." No ifs ands or buts. Below this frequency you may or may not have gain depending on the type of radiator used, but you will not have room related roll off or standing waves.

You are correct on one point (so apparently you did read the article, even if you choose to only accept parts of it). Below the lowest modal frequency a dipolar may or may not cause room gain. This is because room gain is triggered by pressurazation, which a dipolar does not normally cause.

Hi Cmo,

Something definitely was not right with that single speaker setup you heard. Hard to say from here, but it could have been a problem elsewhere in the signal path, or it could have been improperly set bias. I remember once for some reason I had the bias set way, way too low, and on loud passages there was a horrible "crunch" that terrified me until I figured it out. Maybe what you heard was amplifier clipping as you suspected - note that a second speaker + amp would add 6 dB more headroom, so if he was trying to replicate two-speaker SPL's with a single speaker then he'd be asking the amp to deliver four times as much power output as normal.