I could use some advice in advance of a move in a few months. We're moving house, and I'm trying to think rationally about how to set up the stereo a bit in advance. At the new place, the stereo is going to go in a 4 metre x 5 metre room. The ceiling is fairly low compared to where I am now, probably 2.4m. The beams supporting the floor above it are exposed, so one might say the surface is broken up a bit. There is a carpet installed, and I plan to leave it in place or perhaps change it out for a more appealing one.
One question is how much padding would be optimal under the carpet? If I change it out, then I may as well think acoustically and put in the right sort of padding.
A second question is this. How problematic would it be to put the speakers in line with the longer wall rather than the short wall? The set up of the room would be much easier if I did things that way. We plan to mount our 60" flat screen on the wall, and it's not easy to do so on the shorter walls due to window placement, etc. For other reasons, we may want to swap the hinged door to the room for a pocket door. It might work to set the stereo up on the short wall if we did that, but I'm not certain we will. In that case, the long wall would be better.
A third question is this. My main speakers at the moment are a pair of Canton Vento 876.2 speakers. They likely have imperfect directivity behaviour. I've set them up with DIRAC and REW, and the sound is far from bad in any case. I've integrated a sub and bought DIRAC with Bass Control (although I haven't set that up yet, since moving in a bit). I could integrate a second sub in the new place. But now of course the ceiling is lower. I was wondering A) whether I ought to think about possibly switching to a coaxial speaker and B) whether a the vertical behaviour of some non-coaxial speakers might still be better than the Cantons. I'm not eager to spend more money, but on the other hand I got rather a good price on the Canton speakers and could sell them at a fairly small loss. I have some budget for speakers (not Genelec 8351B kind of budget, otherwise I'd probably just get a pair of those). I'm in Europe, which makes some things more and some things less expensive than in North America.
I may want to be able to set up 5.1 system overlapping the stereo as it were, but I'll save my electronics question about that for the appropriate forum.
Any advice or comments is greatly appreciated. I should also add have a pair of Genelec 8030c speakers with a sub that could be brought into use. I'd ideally like to keep them for my office if I could.
N.B. Edited slightly for clarity.
One question is how much padding would be optimal under the carpet? If I change it out, then I may as well think acoustically and put in the right sort of padding.
A second question is this. How problematic would it be to put the speakers in line with the longer wall rather than the short wall? The set up of the room would be much easier if I did things that way. We plan to mount our 60" flat screen on the wall, and it's not easy to do so on the shorter walls due to window placement, etc. For other reasons, we may want to swap the hinged door to the room for a pocket door. It might work to set the stereo up on the short wall if we did that, but I'm not certain we will. In that case, the long wall would be better.
A third question is this. My main speakers at the moment are a pair of Canton Vento 876.2 speakers. They likely have imperfect directivity behaviour. I've set them up with DIRAC and REW, and the sound is far from bad in any case. I've integrated a sub and bought DIRAC with Bass Control (although I haven't set that up yet, since moving in a bit). I could integrate a second sub in the new place. But now of course the ceiling is lower. I was wondering A) whether I ought to think about possibly switching to a coaxial speaker and B) whether a the vertical behaviour of some non-coaxial speakers might still be better than the Cantons. I'm not eager to spend more money, but on the other hand I got rather a good price on the Canton speakers and could sell them at a fairly small loss. I have some budget for speakers (not Genelec 8351B kind of budget, otherwise I'd probably just get a pair of those). I'm in Europe, which makes some things more and some things less expensive than in North America.
I may want to be able to set up 5.1 system overlapping the stereo as it were, but I'll save my electronics question about that for the appropriate forum.
Any advice or comments is greatly appreciated. I should also add have a pair of Genelec 8030c speakers with a sub that could be brought into use. I'd ideally like to keep them for my office if I could.
N.B. Edited slightly for clarity.