As I previously stated, it’s my living space not a dedicated listening room. I’m not into living in an apartment that looks like a Hi-Fi shop. When non-audiophile guests come over I tuck the speakers away in the bedroom which gives me maximum living space. If you haven’t played with near field listening then you wouldn’t believe how fantastic it can sound. Near field negates a lotta issues and puts up a big soundstage. I’ve demoed for a few audiophile friends who were skeptical and they all had the same eye brow lifting look on their faces. 😃 I’ve learned to never take any system for granted. Been in rooms with a ton of expensive gear that sounded meh, and been blown away by the simplest of set ups.
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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- 113 posts total
@jl1ny (your question may have helped me more than it is helping you) I have been though 25% of the papers (adjacent to that link.)
I think,,, that the best way to approach the problem is with some shift in perspective to make it a challenge. Maybe see if you can demo some subs…, if you read the lin, then you know what I would suggest. They (subs) work vest in the corners, but the speakers pull out from the wall is better for imaging. So a multi purpose room is a challenge, but there may be a lot of existing work that can guide us. Approaching it as an engineering challenge is different perspective, than it being solely a problem. And likely brings a better mindset for opening up the solution space. |
baylinor281 posts Couch lol I remember when the term “Davenport”was the norm. Lol! SOFA. There,I fixed it. |
- 113 posts total