2. speakers
  3. 174806-149763

Great speaker sounds terrible in my room?

So today I took a ride to demo a set of speakers that has had my interest for quite some time, the Ref 3A Royal Virtuoso. These things are completely overbuilt, top notch parts and built like tombstones, the cabinets are made of Corian and are completely inert. They sounded excellent during the demo. The owner was running them with a beautiful VAC preamp / Pass labs amp and a Moon Dac-streamer. They were on 24” stands and approximately 2ft off the back wall. They sounded superb as expected…I pack em up, take em home. I rig them up…my setup is near field with the speakers 10ft off the front wall and the speakers are 5ft away from my listening position. I fire them up and….shocker. They got nothing. They literally were lost with Zero bass response. I actually thought maybe something was connected wrong…I checked the connections ( more on that in a minute) all good. These are higher efficiency (91db) than my ProAc Response D2’s (88db) yet the Ref 3A’s sounded much lower at my usual listening level. I’m still scratching my head over how this speaker is unable to kick ass. I have decent gear with plenty of firepower (ARC D400MKII amp, Levinson 380s Pre, Denafrips Terminator Dac, Aurender N100SC streamer. I’ve had Sonus Farber Concertino’s, Vienna Acoustics Haydn, KEF 150’s and my ProAcs all set up in the same manner and they all were excellent performers. The one thing that I’m wondering about is the Binding post on the Ref 3A…it uses the Cardas screw down clamp type post that only accepts spades or bare wire. my cables are banana terminated and I was using cheapo adapters. Could this all could be a connection related issue or just a speaker/room mismatch?

Thoughts / comments are much appreciated

 

128x128jl1ny

Showing 3 responses by sandthemall

sandthemall
544 posts
 

Your repositioning was a relatively small adjustment and yet it made a big difference. Wait until you get your dedicated listening room. The room is the biggest influencer. You're mostly listening to your room. Small speakers are usually easier in challenging rooms.

 

 

sandthemall
544 posts
 

Subs are fine. But you still need to dial in the room. What I’ve found is that when a room is treated well everything improves. Otherwise, you’ll have great bass but still have time smear. Don’t think you have it? Everyone has it to some extent. Get the room right and you get to the point where there’s more coherence than smear...achieving that is like finding tighter focus on a camera lens...you wonder how you ever thought what you were listening to before was even listenable. And, everything from top to bottom improves.

Focus, detail, imaging and bass tightness gets very good. Then you add subs. Or like me, you ditch your subs and just enjoy what you have.

How many times have I heard it and never listened: it’s the room...it’s the room...it’s the room. It took something acoustically profound happening to get me to understand it.

sandthemall
544 posts
 

I had a room with perfect sound once. Then I moved.

Took all I learned from that room into the new one. I have good sound now. But not like that room. It was a near perfect listening room.

What made it so great? Without a doubt the acoustic ceiling. It was the early acoustic ceiling made from concrete. No asbestos. 

One side was mostly rock wall. So had to fill the other wall with many carvings and sculptures to mimic the other wall.

Anyway, will probably never see a room like that until I can find someone who does concrete spray ceilings. Brilliant. Hope they come back in style.

 

More to discover