Help - new house - new setup?


I have just moved house and the new room is about 20x18 with 28 foot ceilings and glass/openings on 2 of the walls.

My system was CAT SL1 with spectron musician amp playing through VS VR4jrs. Front end Michell Orbe and Oppo 105.

I went all HT and got Halo A51 and JC1 monos with a Marantz 8802.

I was expecting a big improvement but the sound is lost in this room and sounds poor.

Someone suggested JL audio fathom to take the weight off the VR4rs so I got a 212 which has improved bass substantially but SPLs are still weak.

I feel I need to upgrade the JR4s and would like to spend up to 10k on some new speakers or Albert is advocating 5k to upgrade the JR4s.

Any suggestions would be most welcome as I live in the sticks and my nearest decent dealer is 250 miles away.

I am considering ML Montis/Summit, Revel Salon, Wilson Sophia 3, Thiel cs 3.7 and Legacy Whispers among others.

My main concern is having a speaker that will give the SPL level necessary for this room.
musicalal

Showing 2 responses by larryi

First things first. No matter how nice the speaker placement in your previous home was, it is entirely irrelevant to what will work in the new place. You need to experiment quite a bit with speaker and listening chair placement. This could be random trial and error or use of some systemmatic methodology (google "Wilson" or "Sumiko" method). If you go with some kind of placement calculation, you will still need to actually do a lot of experimenting.

A room with a nearly square floorplan tends to be problematic, and the high ceiling makes it worse. High ceilings tend to suck the life out of the sound. Still, I have heard very large rooms with high ceilings sound surprisingly good when the speakers were properly placed.

In rooms like this, multiple subwoofers make sense. The use of two or more subwoofers is not to get more bass (most subwoofers can deliver excessive quantities of bass to almost ANY room), but to achieve more uniform bass coverage.

I am less enamoured with the idea of going with bigger speakers for higher sound pressure levels. While I am a fan of big speakers (I like certain horn systems), I particularly enjoy listening at quite low sound levels. Quality, not quantity matters most to me. If you try to overcome the dead sound of your setup with higher volume level, you could make the contribution of destructive room reflections and resonance worse. I would try moving the listening seat closer to the speakers (and move the speakers farther away from the side walls), to make the setup more of a near-field setup; this decreases the contribution of the room to the sound. It is a "free" experiment.

Good luck and I hope everything works out.
If it is feasible, you should hold off selling any subwoofer until after you have set up the new speakers, broken them in, and tried different room arrangments. It might be the case that you could still use the subwoofer. Often, a subwoofer helps with tricky setups even if there really isn't a need for more bass. They can help even out room response. You would, in effect, be keeping around one more tool, just in case.