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

 

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@vuch All I wanted was a secondary set of speakers for late night listening. Seemed simple enough but noooo.

 

@mapman No bueno! Definitely not right, I turned off the Rel as well and the music was skewed/not right. You know, bass issues aside, I must say these speakers hide nothing. If a recording is garbage or awesome your damn well gonna know it. Not too sure if I dig that. Totally different listening experience than my ProAcs.

Well sounds like you should be good to go with the sub option.  Bass might fill in on the refs as they break in.  Time will tell. 

and I'll bet you have to dial it in pretty high in the frequency range for a sub

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.