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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: RE: Speakers for classical in a large room. posted by Duke on April 7, 2011 at 19:37:16:
As well as agreeing with Duke's reasons for suggesting a narrow pattern speaker, I'll add another. The room setup is asymmetrical with the speakers in an area closer to the left wall and a large window area where the left wall first reflections would probably originate. I can't see how far away the right side wall is but it's obviously far enough away to create a very different reflection arrival time, which will tend to pull the centre image to the left where the reflections will be stronger, and the nature of the right wall may well create a different reflection spectrum than that of the left wall. Increasing the proportion of direct sound in the overall sound balance is a very good idea.
That raises a question for the OP. One of the simplest ways to increase the proportion of direct sound in what is heard is simply to move the speakers further from the walls and the listening position closer to the speakers, in other words to use a near field listening setup. That's certainly possible in the room but the question is whether the OP wants a setup that works very well at the listening position and may not work so well elsewhere in the open space, especially in relation to actual listening level, or whether they want to be able to "fill the whole space" with sound.
Absorption treatments can certainly help balance the differences in reflection caused by the asymmetrical placement in the overall space but it's much easier to balance things that way if the speakers are placed symmetrically rather than significantly closer to one side of the space. I've lived with a situation where my speakers were in the left half of a wide area, with the right wall even further from the right speaker than the left wall was from the same speaker, and it does make balancing things quite difficult. If you can increase the proportion of direct sound in what you hear by speaker choice and/or placement, that's certainly a simpler way to go in my view.
If the aim is simply to achieve good sound at the listening position, then the current speakers in a near field setup may work reasonably well if they are moved further out into the room. They may well exhibit a bit more "subtlety and refinement" if the strength of the early reflections is reduced as they will be in a near field setup. Whether they will be increased enough to satisfy the OP is another question but it is worth a try if the main concern is for sound quality at the listening position. Strong early reflections can certainly reduce the subtlety and refinement a speaker but minimising the impact of those reflections doesn't mean that a given speaker will then display the level of subtlety and refinement desired.
If the OP wants to "fill the space" with sound, then a high sensitivity narrow pattern speaker would probably be a much better choice because it would be more capable of delivering the higher SPLs required to fill a large space. As far as tonality and a lot of musical qualities go, the sound you get well away from a near field listening position can be quite reasonable, it's simply another version of the "listening in the next room" situation without some of the problems that intervening walls can cause, but producing satisfying dynamic range and reasonable levels for large orchestral climaxes across a big area is a very different issue to simply getting reasonable sound quality at lower levels across the same big area.
David Aiken
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Follow Ups
- Agreement plus… - David Aiken 04/8/1102:57:00 04/8/11 (0)
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