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Speaker Distortion or Room Interaction ?

my floor-standing speakers are quite powerful already, and sound very clean up to a certain (fairly loud but not party-loud) volume. BUT past
that, the sound starts becoming increasingly smeared and eventually becomes harsh and unlistenable, probably due to room reflections, but i have no way of measuring speaker-distortion levels like they do in stereophile. my room does
have some reverberation issues, which i've treated with echo-busters to good effect (although the room is still far from "dead"). but this is my living room also, so i really don't want to add any more room treatments. at the same time i've been seriously looking at even bigger speakers for a few years to get more resolution, sonority, and headroom in the low bass dept. in other words, i dream of listening to large-scale works of music at more realistic volume levels with a minimum of distortion. SO, the question is, if i go ahead with an upgrade, am i going to run into the same problem, or possibly even encounter worse room interactions?
or would a larger speaker sound so much better at a more controlled/lower volume level that it would be worth it for that alone? i know what some of you are thinking- build a dedicated listening room, otherwise the dream of recreating beethoven #5 will forever elude me.
french_fries

Showing 1 response by plato

plato
1,543 posts
 
Questions you need to be asking are: How large is the listening room? What is the speaker's sensitivity rating? What is the maximum rated output of your speakers in dBs? How loud is your listening level? And how much amplifier power do you have available?

What I'm thinking is that it's very possible that your amps are simply clipping and being driven into serious distortion and this is being reproduced by the speakers (which can be harmful to both speakers and the amp). It may not be a room overload issue at all. If you don't know the answers to the above questions, then this is the most likely cause of your distortion (not enough amplifier power). Know that your volume control could be relatively low, at 11 O'clock for example, and you could still be driving some amps into distortion at that setting. Where the amps clip, relative to the position of the volume control, depends on the output level of the source feeding the amp and its own input sensitivity...
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