I often see folks recommending speakers (or discouraging) certain speakers based on size of the listeners room. While I have a good idea what would be considered a small room (both length and width no more than 15 ft), I am uncertain on the drawing line between a medium/moderate room and a large room. Would a 15 x 20 ft be considered medium, and 20 x 25 a large? Disregarding room height for now.
I recommend you watch Eric Alexander's video on this subject. He agrees with me, the whole small room/small speaker thing is bogus.
Bass frequencies are very long wavelength, so long that every room is small relative to a 50+ foot bass wave. So every room will have bass resonance problems. Big speakers with more bass output might seem to be worse, but really not, it is the room, and you can prove this as I have done by isolating the speakers on Townshend Podiums. This excites the room less and alleviates a lot of bass problems everyone will have you believe can only be handled with tube traps.
A much better approach to speaker selection is to start with number one, you do not want anything less than 92dB sensitivity. Number two, how loud do they need to play? #1 and #2 filter the field down to where you can select from what is left those that have the sound you want and the price you can afford. Size is never a factor, not in terms of sound anyway. WAF, bragging rights, different story.
Case in point - I had a pair of Maggie 3.6R's in a small basement listening area- maybe 10'x15' -- WAY too big of a presence for that room, especially with 7' ceilings. Everything was muddy and compressed as sound waves collided everywhere. Switched them out for a pair of Triangle Celius and the sound was infinitely better even though the Maggies are, I believe, better speakers than the Celius.
As MC points out though, it also depends on the sensitivity and your listening volume.
15X20 is still pretty small. That is the size of my TV room. 20X25 is a nice room but still not really big. I'm a big speaker fan and I have had big speakers in small rooms and they still sound pretty good. Not a real fan of small speakers in big rooms, they can work but you might end up driving them really hard.
All small room need to be controlled for the reverberation timing...
Passive material treatment in balance between diffusive sbsorbing and reflective surfaces
ACTIVE treatment with 32 tubes and pipes fine tuned , my mechanical equalizer, take care of ALL resonance...
An electronical equalizer modify the reponse of the speakers to the room and then modify the original "voice" of the speaker for a position very restrictive in millimeter...you turn the head a few inches and all is lost...
My mechanical equalizer modify FOR MY EARS the response of the room to each of the speakers drivers in particular without modifying the response of the speakers themselves... Instead of finetuning with a mic and chosen frequencies, the finetuning is with large bandwith response of the room/ears with human voices timbre coming from the speakers.... And all position of listening in the room are then optimized not only the main listening position...
It need to be done in a dedicated audio room.... No wife will accept 32 tubes and pipes distributed around in his living room...
The result: my 500 bucks sytem is so good that any upgrade is cancelled till i die...
Acoustic and psychoacoustic are the key.... The rest is important for sure but means way less in S.Q. without total control of the room and plastic fluid adaptation of the room to the speakers...
I would think 20’ x 25’ would be about the minimum to be called large.
Rules in audio can always be broken. I have heard an outstanding system in something the size of a walk in closet... and not a big one. I have hear terrible sounding, very expensive big components in a tiny space. I have heard a ridiculously large system in a tiny room that was breathtaking..
If you want scale and volume in a big space you need big speakers. It can be harder to get really big speakers to sound good in a small room. But it is absolutely possible. I think where the utility of the rule comes in is in cost effectiveness and in ease of achieving good sound.
. Most of us approach this from the inexpensive side. So spending $40K on speakers for a tiny room might not be putting money in the right place when $20K speakers would have done the trick... but even then it is a question of what sound do you value... if massive bass is it... then oversized speakers may be the ticket.
Like everything in audio, there is seldom a rule that does not have exceptions.
There is no real value to defining room sizes. The point is in general you need larger speakers to deliver flat extended bass in larger rooms.
A good example is Ohm Walsh speakers. https://ohmspeaker.com. You will find every speaker there provides specs on the range of room sizes each is suited for. Too large a speaker in too small of a room will deliver too much bass. Too small a speaker in too large a room not enough. The right amount provides near flat response down to the lowest frequency spec’ed in the right sized room.
Beyond that, room acoustics will always have an effect on bass response producing more at some frequencies and less at others. That’s where setup and possibly room treatments can come in.
The Ohm Walsh very wide dispersion near Omni speaker design is pretty unique though and makes it easier to place the speakers effectively in the room for good results than more directional designs. Also closer to walls and corners which tends to reinforce bass.
The Walsh models large and small all tend to sound similar placed in the right size room.
So how big the speaker need be and how much it will cost is determined primarily by room size which makes choosing the right model per room very easy. More detail:
My room is only 11x10 x 9 and I have Thiel CS3.7's in there. For over a decade I was hearing that you need a large room for these speakers so I held off from buying them. However, recently I put in room treatments and then Convolution file based DSP and the CS3.7's sound about 95% as good as in a much larger room. I no longer am working on improving the acoustics of the room just trying out different gear. I use ROON to run the Convolution.
In my own case, height proved very important, as my ceilings are low (6.5 feet). Otherwise, my space is 14 ft. by 28 ft. with a hallway connected.
A low ceiling meant that tower speakers weren’t possible. I tried several, all with different tweeter technologies. All were impossibly bright, no matter what I did. Stand mounts were what I had to do, on lower than average speaker stands.
MC mentions Townshend podiums as a method which "alleviates a lot of bass problems everyone will have you believe can only be handled with tube traps." He didn’t mention he has a distributed bass array. That’s a big part of his bass solution, but I am not sure if your room size would be amenable to a DBA. If that is true, I suspect that the podiums won’t be enough to obviate bass traps. (MC, can a small room handle a DBA? If not, won’t he need some bass traps along with the special podiums?)
I suspect that the podiums won’t be enough to obviate bass traps
Use some discarded tubes and pipes, seal them with plastic sheet, try different volumes or/and heights, put some straws with some different leghts and diameters, ( cut the straw in diagonals to be able to insert one part into one another for variable lenght and also very minute diameter experiment) listening experiments are needed to fine tune... It takes me a month for my 32 tubes...But the result is totally without audible flaws and i control ALL aspect of acoustics: imaging, soundstage, listener envelopment and trimbre perception...
It is the beginning of my " Helmholtz mechanical equalizer": cost nothing...Just fun to deal with the listening experiments.... Trust yourself....
My bass is clear, touch my chest and i own only 7 inches driver able tough to fill my room with a brass orchestra with a tuba... 13 feet by 13 feet 81/2 feet high...
No need for a sub , i own one and it is disconnected for ever.... 😊 And i like bass...
I dont listen cinema and plane coming down for sure....But the note of the tuba are all there....
My bass is marvellous....
Vibrations devices can clear the bass NEVER increase it in the room..... I know, i own my own springs devices system .... No cost also...
Science gives more money than it ask for..... 😊 The opposite of many tweaks....Replicate them or create them....
I actually posted the original question not because I need to 'fix' anything at home, or wondering what speakers would be best for my room, but rather as a general question/comment on seeing lots of posts recommending, or not, speakers on the basis of room size, with the later being somewhat ambiguously described, which could be confusing for folks just entering the 'audiophile'.
I actually posted the original question not because I need to 'fix' anything at home, or wondering what speakers would be best for my room, but rather as a general question/comment on seeing lots of posts recommending, or not, speakers on the basis of room size, with the later being somewhat ambiguously described, which could be confusing for folks just entering the 'audiophile'.
You were right ,it is an interesting question indeed...
I actually posted the original question not because I need to 'fix'
anything at home, or wondering what speakers would be best for my room,
but rather as a general question/comment on seeing lots of posts
recommending, or not, speakers on the basis of room size, with the later
being somewhat ambiguously described, which could be confusing for
folks just entering the 'audiophile'.
There's a lot of stuff audiophiles say that seems to serve no other purpose than to confuse new audiophiles. The size the speakers to the room myth is one. If the speakers fit and you like the way they look and sound then it really does not matter. You will have the same problems with the same sonic output regardless of the size of the speakers.
Audiophiles will do their best to confuse you with impedance. If the speakers are high sensitivity- arbitrarily defined by me as greater than 92dB- then impedance simply becomes a non-issue.
If you are into turntables, audiophiles will confuse you with, well pretty much all of it.
Audiophiles will confuse you with watts and ohms. Impedance again! Watts don't matter, because since you never let yourself be confused by speaker impedance you bought 95dB speakers a handful of watts can drive easily and so watts don't matter!
There are some things that are a little confusing. Audiophiles will confuse you even more about those! The biggest one is low bass, arbitrarily defined as below 80 Hz, is a whole different animal. From 80 Hz on down it hardly matters what you use, or where you put it. What matters is you have a lot of them. From 80 Hz on up everything but everything depends on precisely where you put them and that there are two and only two of them. Simple, clear- until audiophiles start explaining.
Just you wait and see. Here they come to save the day, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
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