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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@rixthetrick

sorry if i was being obtuse

by ’l-f’ -- i simply mean low frequency

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to add to the discussion, i would remind the op and others here interested that

a) speaker placement for effective/optimal boundary reinforcement of low frequencies,

b) treating a room to address unwanted resonances/nodes and reflections

c) correctly integrating subwoofer(s)

may be somewhat inter-related but are different things, each with different benefits, solving for different deficiencies

@larry5729
Larry, I do not have a dedicated room, my listening area is the back end of my living space and cannot be rearranged. The room is 15x12 (17x12 if you count the recess in the front wall). The speakers are 5.5 ft apart, soundstage is deep and wall to wall, higher than what my ProAcs were able to do. At this point I have no complaints other than the bass response which is, what it is with my set up in this room. Hopefully I can get my sub to pick up the slack.

Btw: the room is fairly well behaved. Recent addition of floor to ceiling corner bass traps in an offensive corner solved my biggest room issue.

If those Ref 3A's are brand new you definitely need to give them at least 200 hours of break-in, maybe more. Best wishes.