Room comes alive only with high listening levels, need speaker change?

[Blackmorec]

Hi Spudgun,

With one exception your components are perfectly adequate to achieve highly involving music, so unless one or more of your electronic components is in severe need of a service I think you need to focus your attention on set-up.
So a few questions:
What’s the grey panel under each speaker?
Are those speakers at the other end of the room. Are they wired to anything or just free standing?
What racks are you using?

If that was my room and system, this is what i would do:

1. Temporarily remove all room treatments. That’s a lot of bass trapping for a 2-way speaker in a good size room.
2. Get the electronics off those thin glass shelves. Naim may have made glass work in their Fraim design, but generally thin, unsupported glass under any electronics sounds horrible…it rings (resonates) energetically, imparts a hard, brittle character to the music and typically has thin bass.
3. Consider installing a dedicated electricity consumer unit with dedicated line to the hi-fi room. This is a low cost upgrade that often brings surprising results but does take several weeks to run-in properly
4. Check the polarity of all the mains plugs and confirm that the phase going to each component is correct. You need to know what you’re doing with mains, as it’s potentially lethal so don’t check anything if you don’t know how to do it safely with a dedicated phase checker
5. Install the speaker spikes directly into the floor. Use the speakers’ standard floor protectors and make sure there’s absolutely no movement. Do this by gently pushing the speakers across the diagonal while feeling for any movement in the spikes. They should be utterly solid.
6. Check fuses in all your components and make sure they are the standard Naim supplied pieces. Ask you dealer for a few extras. The same way fuses can improve a system (if you dont mind paying £100s for something that’s broken when it works properly) , bad fuses can also cause considerable deterioration of sound quality, especially loss of vibrancy and lack of involvement.
7. Remove the additional speakers if possible
8. Personally I would go through an extensive speaker positioning exercise to find the right place to maximise performance. I would also avoid placing speakers with a downward facing reflex port too close to a corner and I would likely end up with the speakers firing across the room, well away from walls and not in such close proximity to bass traps, if traps proved necessary.

[Spudgun]

Hi Blackmorec, thanks for the suggestions.
The grey panels under the speakers are heay duty tiles I had in the garage, tried them under the speakers and found that the sound had more focus and was less bloated so kept them under.
The speakers behond are on surround duty and wired to my Anthem AV amp.
In response to your numbered points:

1. The room started off without treatments and the sound was worse than it is now I’ve tried on several occasions to remove the treatments and can confirm that they make a significant difference.
2. Without being able to try different racks would it be worth putting the gear on floor or a desy and see what changes maybe?
3. A dedicated supply is something I will eventually consider.
4. Nice idea will look into buying a phase checker
5. Will do.
6. Will try this too
7. Going to measure the room with REW again when I get some spare time and I’ll try removing everything superfluous and see what difference it makes. Unfortunately the speakers will need to be put back because the room serves as a home cinema too.
8. I’ve previously done this by ear and with REW and in fact the position of the settee and the speakers are the best I can get in the room.

Thanks for the ideas I’ll certainly be trying them out.
Spud

[Blackmorec]

Hi Spud,
Nice to hear from you. I hope you posted here not only to get your question answered but to find some motivation to fix it

1. Clearly some (many) rooms require a little help with acoustics and you’re clear there’s a benefit. Check it again if ever there’s a major change to the sound of your system. You don’t want to land up fixing a problem that no longer exists.
2. What’s a lot easier is to find a way to ‘doctor’ your current rack. Maybe some strips of some sort of soft gummy material like blue tack struck firmly to the underside of the shelves to prevent some of the resonance. If you hear a positive difference you like, then buy a good performing, moderately priced rack like an Atacama. Their racks are made to manage vibration with optimized bamboo shelves. The stands are very well made, look very nice, are easy to install and they sound excellent. Very excellent in fact and they don’t cost the earth.
3. A dedicated supply will improve both music and video reproduction and sound. For a relatively small amount of money you would get a disproportionately large increase in enjoyment. Life is short so if you have money you should do it. You’ll thank me
4. If ever I’m not happy with sound for an unknown reason i would also check the polarity of the IEC sockets to make sure that their PCs match. You can do this at the same time you have the system down for the new rack
5. Good
6. Good
7. Extra speakers are ok as long as they are connected up.
8. Did you evaluate and position your speakers with all the room treatments in place or without? Very often we position our speakers as best we can but find the room is causing a problem in the bass. We add traps and the problem is solved, so we need to close the loop by going back to check that the speakers are still in their optimum position. Just mentioning this as its a mistake that i made when i added traps to my previous room. I was happy with the improvement the traps brought and didn’t think to go back to check the speakers.
   Anyway, thanks for the chat and have fun