Milky

Every listening area comes with its own challenges. Rooms actually resonate anyway, although usually at rates way below our hearing capabilities. They are called “standing waves”.

Sound is produced as waves, and the lower the frequency, the more widely spaced the waves are. It stands to reason that, if you sit in certain places in the room, you will experience the top of the wave, and in others, you will feel the bottom. Furthermore, these waves bounce off surfaces and return out of phase to cancel some of the energy from the original sound. This leads to bright spots, where the reflected sound augments the original, and dull spots where the reflection cancels some of the energy. Bottom line, every room has a sweet spot, not necessarily in the centre. This sweet spot is modified by the shape of the room, the building materials, the frequencies being generated – even your own body will absorb some frequencies and bounce others.

You have many options. Moving yourself around, moving the speakers around, varying the levels of the various drivers, using mobile baffles to reflect the sound to your listening area and cancelling reflected sounds etc, etc.

Provided you can do all of this without having to appease a significant other, you should arrive at a pleasing place to enjoy your music. I can’t offer any advice for appeasing partners.

I’m interested in your comment about using compression to adjust the bass. This is not what compression does. It “squishes” the dynamic range of the music so that quiet and loud passages meet in the middle. Typically, it is used in FM broadcasts so that all the music (and voice) comes out of your speakers at about the same level, so you are not diving for the volume control in quiet passages, and then turning it down again in louder passages.

Sound is transmitted as vibrations. That is how we hear – the speakers vibrate, and our eardrums vibrate in sympathy with the speaker cones. Unfortunately, anything, particularly smooth, hard surfaces either reflect or also vibrate with the same stimulus. Sometimes, these vibrations enhance the original sound, and it gives a more “live” feel, but, in other cases, the vibrations occur out of phase with the original source, and this causes cancellation of some frequencies and “colouration” of others, depending on the natural resonant frequencies of the reflecting materials.

If you moved all that equipment into an anechoic room, lined with foam to prevent secondary vibration, it would lose all of the colouration cause by secondary vibrations, but it would also probably sound “dead”. The trick is to design a listening environment which does not produce significant secondary reflections of the original sound, but without completely suppressing the “pleasant” sounds we like to hear. This is not easy, and there are companies who make a lot of money to design radio studios and auditoria which only let the real music through. They use specially placed microphones to listen for secondary vibrations, and then design baffles to break them up.

Obviously, avoid hard, reflective surfaces, particularly made of plasterboard, as that will literally shake itself loose over time. We all have walls, but they can be broken up with acoustic tiles, adjustable drapes, even random timber lengths to reinforce and reflect the sounds. Bricks are better as a building material, because they don’t resonate as easily. However, they are hard and reflective, so need drapes or random surfaces to scatter the vibrations.

The playback equipment also needs to fit comfortably to the room size. Your room is 2,000 cubic feet in volume, yet your picture shows drivers more suited to a very large auditorium, or even an outdoor concert area. Size isn’t everything, particularly in a badly reflective room. An 18 inch woofer can move a massive amount of air, and all that air has to go somewhere.

I have a purpose-built music room, and that has some serious music equipment in it, but I also have a “normal sized” family room, where we watch movies on a widescreen TV. It only has a 100w 5.1 amp driving a set of Jamo speakers which are smaller than those in my car doors. The sub is the size of a beer carton, yet it delivers excellent sound up to the levels that the room (and our ears) can tolerate. Timber strips glued to the flat wall surfaces, as well as drapes over the windows absorb or scatter unwanted reflections.

As you have discovered, equipment placement can make a huge difference. Slightly wider apart, slightly closer, sub at the front or back, maybe right in the centre of the listening area. Try lifting the speakers off the floor, so that the drivers are at or above ear level when in your favourite listening position. All these things need to be experimented with, noting the changes with each configuration until you get the right sound.

I remember that your original query about BAE was because you like everything to be heavily compressed. Personally, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I like the “light and dark” of the different instruments and the way they blend together, but, to each their own. Suffice to say that compression increases the liability of hard surfaces reflecting.

Thanks for the update, Mwyann.
I’ve passed your comments on to Leif and asked that he can make the fix to the production version and get it up on the website as soon as possible.