Welcome New Listening Room, Welcome New System!

I am, and it has been an interesting journey where I have learnt a lot.

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Getting the room as it needs to be can be quite challengingā€¦when you manage to succeed it is extremely satisfyingā€¦

Good on you Nigel and your room has bags of character. As Iā€™m sat here, I keep getting image- flashes of a pair of 606s in Old Oak in keeping with your roomā€¦:wink: Enjoy Peter

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Did you mean Flight of the Cosmic Hippo? Listening to that now - no boom here. So maybe there is a particular frequency that is a problem for me that isnā€™t on this trackā€¦ though as my wife is in the house (also daughter 2) I canā€™t turn the volume up too much

Oops sorry just seen your correcting post :grimacing:

Yes, I have a particular frequency that still reverberates (standing wave or comb filter), despite all my efforts. Having said that all rooms will have their own unique set of standing waves, you canā€™t avoid them. All you can do is try to decrease the amplitude of those standing waves as best you can. Mine are at a level now that they really are not too bothersome and are only slightly noticeable at certain points on certain tracks.

Obviously big speakers in troublesome rooms are more of a challenge. You just have to keep trying to ameliorate these issues until you reach a point that they are slight enough not to get in the way of your enjoyment of music.

You just canā€™t change the laws of physics.

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Great room Nigel, loads of character, I grew up in a house like that and have very fond memories of it ā€¦ even though we were convinced it was haunted! Much more ā€œhomelyā€ than the modern box I live in now!

The MAā€™s look great in there, toed in more than I have mine, but I canā€™t manage any of the recommended ratios in my roughly 7m x 4m room listening across the narrow width :grimacing:

Cheers,
Mark

Agreed, I felt a bit apologetic about my speakers in my early posts on here feeling they wouldnā€™t be deemed worthy :grinning:

In the past couple of months Iā€™ve learnt a lot on here and no longer feel the same way, the problems Iā€™ve been having are down to the room.

Theyā€™ve had great reviews from the likes of Stereophile driven by equipment of far higher spec than mine and the finish on them is simply beautiful, not a seam or screw visible.
So hereā€™s a pic as a way of apologising to them :grinning:

Cheers,
Mark

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Lovely speakers. And wholly agree, the newer MA speakers are a marked difference to the metal dome monsters of old, where the higher frequencies could sound like a bucket of broken glass being shaken! :exploding_head:

I experimented with toe in and directly facing the listener was best. Any less toe in resulted in a very slight blurring of mids and highs.

Great story and thank you for sharing. It sounds like the most overlooked and biggest upgrade you can give yourself - at very little or no cost!

I took a similar journey 2 months ago (7.6 x 6.5m room). I used a YouTube video on the New Record Day You Tube channel by a young chap in the US. I think he calls the system LOTS - main tools were masking tape and a tape measure. It was a huge benefit. I know there are others based on bass response, or using calibration discs, but LOTS was the only one that worked for me, having tried the others. Iā€™ve marked my wooden floor with UV marker so I donā€™t ever lose the positioning - my B&W 802 speakers are quite far into my living room, so when we have guests, I have to slide them back.

Yours and others story of room and speaker placement probably needs a lot more airing. I see a lot of photos of wonderful and very expensive set ups with speakers pinned against walls and the sound may be fine, but I wonder if it is as good as it might be. Not as sexy as new kit, but for pure listening pleasure the hours of effort are worth it.

Thanks once again.

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I remain surprised that boundary designs are so rare these days given your observations. I suspect more people are looking for more depth in their stereo presentation but then compromise by not giving their speakers enough room to breath.

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One of the few upsides of this wretched lockdown is that it has afforded me time to listen to music, and thankfully I am past the ā€˜adjustment and assessmentā€™ phase of listening in the wake of my room move. I am now just listening to what I fancy.

Boy, it is like a new system, with no hardware additions! Every album now sounds super-natural. I can listen for hours with no fatigue, just an urge to put on another album. I have noticed that some albums and tracks that were rather average in the small listening room have taken on a scale I was previously unaware of and the new listening environment allows new meaning of these tracks to come to the fore.

It is weird in that music is presented so naturally, no pyrotechnics, no crash-bang, no exaggerations, no OTT in yer face ā€˜ave some er that! In a way, rather unimpressive, but all the more impressive for it, and deeply involving, if that makes any sense.

I am listening to Cara Dillonā€™s album Wanderer. Gosh it is wonderful. I just wasnā€™t getting the delicacy of her vocals and acoustic instruments in my small listening room. Good hints of this before, but not drawing me in so much as listening now in the larger room.

In one sense I find this a little disconcerting. I spent quite a bit of money on upgrades when the system was in the small room. Yes, I heard improvements, but nothing on the scale of the uplift from simply moving rooms and paying attention to set up and the impact of room acoustics.

This topic has of course been touched on before in this place (see The Listening Room Reality thread for example), but I think it worth reiterating how important the listening environment is to perceived sound quality and sheer enjoyment of music.

My take from all of this is that the room does place ultimate limitations on the SQ a given system is able to deliver. So as you upgrade your kit think about when you might be running up against the buffers of room limitations. Upgrade kit and listening environment in harmony with each other.

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Couldnā€™t agree more Nigel. :+1:t3: ATB Peter

A very big room can place serious limitations to sound quality and performance of a system too. Try to maximise the sound of your Monitor GX300 little floorstanders in a 100 m2 room. Itā€™s impossible.
As always, room and adequate speakers are the key.

Of course, but I expect most of us have rooms smaller than we would ideally like, or have competing domestic priorities, pushing hifi into less than ideal setttings. So the issue is really about having speakers that are too big for the listen space, rather than the reverse.

Yes, I agree. But wanted to say that the room, itself, is not a problem. The problem is the choice of wrong speakers to fit that room.

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Good point.

There are some spaces however that simply will not work without serious room treatment. Even then you might have to admit defeat and try another space.

This is what happened with me. Although my speakers are large, the issue in the smaller room was never about a booming bass, in fact the bass seems way deeper (but controlled) in the larger room. It was just the limited size of the smaller room, combined with its square shape, meant the bass never had the space to breathe and complex music just got congested, a result of so many reflections doing their destructive stuff.

Donā€™t get me wrong, it was never bad and I could enjoy music in there. It just limited the ultimate performance of my rather expensive system.

Are we back to the plant again FR? :+1:t3::joy: ATB Peter

That palm seems positively happy in its work!

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If you mean by plant as upgrading the room atmosphere, yes, I agree :grin: