MattHooper
Grand Contributor
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Gimme the Grimm over the D&D any day!
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GRIMM Audio LS1c & SB1 DSP Speaker Review
- Thread starter amirm
- Start date
Gimme the Grimm over the D&D any day!
My bet would be that the bass will be good in room and probably not need much attenuation with a "room correction" software.
Flat speakers boom like f*ck in most rooms and need correction. A bass response like this usually sounds clean and clear without correction in a domestic room IME and was probably chosen because 99% of people buying speakers to enjoy at home do not use any overiding software.
Just enthusiasts.
IME.
In my rooms here which are fairly standard Edwardian terrace, you are tight bass correction wasn’t really needed because…
Keith
Keith
£40k average speaker over a top performer at a third of the price, yes of course.
Keith
Cool to see this speaker reviewed here. I can certainly relate to Amir's opinions on it subjectively and do feel speakers with these macro aspects (large baffle with large round overs) are very much in a league of their of their own as stated in the review. A sort of clone of these is on my to do list and some fairly extensive experimentation has led me value many of the aspects the LS1 exhibits. I have yet to hear a speaker sound as good as my prototypes that have 3" radius round overs.
I've always been a proponent of large round overs, the larger the better, one simply needs to hear a speaker with effectively no edge diffraction down to 1khz and often lower to understand. There is a clarity that I do not hear in other speakers which is doubly apparent when the music tends to get busy, which makes a lot of sense (at least to me). The more busy and sustained the signal gets, the greater the benefit of the round over as the content starts to resemble something closer to noise which is a scenario that I find edge diffraction to be most apparent.
Here are some quick in room measurements of my last prototype, about 0-60 in room. I don't think you need me to tell you this speaker sounds incredible.
If I ever get around to making my LS1 clones, I'll be sure to share them here.
Congrats to Grimm on making an speaker I have no doubt is incredible, shame they priced it out of the hands of regular humans. At least they are not hard to DIY. I have 3d print of the necessary round overs that I may post up somewhere for others to use, and the cabinet construction is pretty well documented and very simple.
I've always been a proponent of large round overs, the larger the better, one simply needs to hear a speaker with effectively no edge diffraction down to 1khz and often lower to understand. There is a clarity that I do not hear in other speakers which is doubly apparent when the music tends to get busy, which makes a lot of sense (at least to me). The more busy and sustained the signal gets, the greater the benefit of the round over as the content starts to resemble something closer to noise which is a scenario that I find edge diffraction to be most apparent.
Here are some quick in room measurements of my last prototype, about 0-60 in room. I don't think you need me to tell you this speaker sounds incredible.
If I ever get around to making my LS1 clones, I'll be sure to share them here.
Congrats to Grimm on making an speaker I have no doubt is incredible, shame they priced it out of the hands of regular humans. At least they are not hard to DIY. I have 3d print of the necessary round overs that I may post up somewhere for others to use, and the cabinet construction is pretty well documented and very simple.
BeeKay
Major Contributor
The reality is that most people don't use room correction and most full range speakers sound dreadful in the bass as a result. The worst I have tried here for that are Harbeth active 40s but others are pretty awful and in need of cut too.
You have lots of experience of correction of various speakers in your house, I have only tried a few here, but I did find locating the speakers so as to minimise their excitation of the main modes but let them excite the harmonics a bit sounds best, and means far less correction needed (which is great when more than 1 person is listening.
Much easier with bookshelf speakers, with the Harbeth 40s I couldn't find a location that worked satisfactorily, though luckily most music didn't go low enough to be hateful..
Agree too. the group delay is inverse to the xover frequency. The best setup would be sealed box woofers in a sealed room. Below the lowest room mode, this goes flat to DC in theory at least (air tight doors and windows). EQing flat to 10Hz or below is possible. no need for phase linear when the minimum phase response is flat well below 20Hz
Thx! ...I'd like to hear that setup.
My current sub project is similar, only without a room. I'm trying to use as much sealed sub power as possible outdoors, with carefully crafted IIR-only boost for low extension. Goal is smoothest, lowest rise in group delay as possible. The first trial last week of four nice BMS 18"s sounded damn good.
Biggest problem outdoors, as I'm sure you can imagine... it's damn scary how many sealed subs and the power they need, to match reflex performance.
Where's that sealed room of yours ? I think I need at least 16 sealed subs lol
Like you say, if we could get flat-to-DC with minimum phase, there's no need for for linear-phase.
I've come to think that zero phase is really what we are after, be it with minimum-phase or linear phase.
So for me, I view linear-phase as just a tool to get to zero phase from bandpass devices.
I've often wondered what flat-to-DC would sound like, minimum-phase vs linear-phase. Impulse start alignments vs impulse peak alignments. Hurts my mellon to think about it. lol
Rightly or wrongly, I've come to view sounds in nature as zero phase....neither minimum nor linear...and that they simply are what they are..... despite being restricted in frequency range.
I've come to the conclusion that minimum phase and linear phase are terms that only apply to sound reproduction and the measurement of such, where we are forced to use bandpass devices.
Don't mean to hijack the LS1 discussion...just interested in your thoughts on here if you can...
I don't think room correction is really needed. A good old bass tone control, that's usually just a low shelf with adjustable gain helps about every full-range rig I've ever used.
Most rooms have at least one peak, often two that needs to be attentuated. You can't do that with a shelf filter.
Most often outdoors is not the target, but indoors, most likely without any room treatment whatsoever for the best reasons in the world.
Room correction is quite limited, if stereo is more than just and only a confirmation of itself. If it is used as intended, as a fun device for music (or devastating sounds in movies), we humans want to walk around - we are at home, take a seat here or there, share with others. (I've never heard of a dude saying "babe, you'll have to sit on my lap to experience the full stereo effect, and my fancy room e/q")
When it comes to filters, they differ from record to record a lot. Some go down to even 20, some 30, some show a cut-off at 40. What sort of a brickwall filter was it, I never know. Why should I care about my stereos little contribution to 'phase'? The room adds a vast amount of group delay. Let it go together with the peaks in amplitud response? I'm pretty much sure I like my recordings more, if the bass is kept on the lean side.
Had a thunderstorm lately, the roof was ratteling, literally. It did not feel nor heard "bass". I suspect that most stereos are set up way to fat as to compensate for Fletcher/Munson curve. Fair enough, but again, why the 'phase' mongering?
Agreed.
I was just pushing back, maybe irrationally, against the idea that low flat extension in full-rangers is necessarily going to boom in a room.
Please elaborate.
You can get lucky of course, and at moderate volume the added bass can work okay - but at least if you turn up the volume it will happen in most rooms.
And it will typically work well on some tracks and less so on others. I'm all for full range systems, but DSP is a very beneficial add-on.
And in many cases not even with two notch filters, if the underlying modes are resonating overly long or do react nonlinear in terms of time and SPL.
Robbo99999
Master Contributor
Yeah, I did say that in a earlier post so I can see the appeal if you're not gonna be using RoomEQ. I mean I'm basing my ideas/opinion on the speaker that it is gonna be room corrected, but maybe that's not a fair & balanced viewpoint, but lot of other speakers are flatter further down into the bass, so would I judge them as worse because they might require room correction vs gradually rolled off speakers, it's a difficult judgement call, I mean how to you justify what is the best bass roll off for best room integration if you're not gonna be using DSP to correct for the room, so in my mind I keep it simple and say to myself the speaker's gonna be room corrected & therefore how much bass capability does it have combined with what kind of distortion levels at those bass SPL levels, which is where the Grimm gets kicked in the nuts a bit. Yeah, so I'm still of the mindset that it's lacking.
I'm not sure what to tell you (or ChatGPT), if we want to mince words and misunderstand on purpose that is fine. I think most people understand that applying EQ doesn't fix the room (how could it?). We don't correct the room, we correct FOR the room. As a consequence of the room's acoustical properties, we apply EQ to compensate.
With regards to EQ not fixing the sound everywhere in the room, this is also to some extent true, depending on your system. But most of the time I don't sit (or even stand) six feet from my sofa when I listen to music, I'm in the sofa. Is it perfect when the sound is still off six feet from my couch? No, but it's way way (way) better than without EQ, especially where I typically sit when I listen to music, which is after all the most important spot to have good sound.
Acoustic treatment to fix issues below 100hz is unrealistic for 99.99% of the music enthusiasts out there.
For the record I also never called it room correction. But is DSP effective to improve the bass response in a music system? 100% Yes.
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Neither speaker positioning nor listener positioning are room correction either.
Either you're strict with everything and only bass traps, panels and such like count as room correction, or you can use a looser definition and EQ/Dirac/Trinnov ... counts as room correction, you can't have it both ways.
All rectangular rooms must have 3 main natural frequencies and the extent to which they, and their harmonics, are excited depends on where in the room the speakers are.
In the same way (but in 3D not 1D) a string player can adjust his timbre by plucking the string in a different place along its length one can get a speaker to excite several of the harmonics of these modes and reduce the excitation of the 3 principle ones. Not much you can do about the vertical but I start with the speakers 1/5 of the length of the room and 1/7 in from the sides which results in lower excitation of the main modes and some harmonics which evens the bass a treat before room compensation IME. It has worked for me for 40+ years and gave pretty satisfactory results before the availability of computers in the loop.
That way bass is fairly even over the room and I only use room compensation if listening on my own.
An adjustable bass roll-off like one of the FR mods Genelec build into their speakers is probably better than providing one alone but IMO this is sensible engineering for domestic customers to enjoy music at home even if not for frequency response enthusiasts.
Certainly, and we offer that in all our systems as well. It's certainly better than nothing if one doesn't have the competency, time or interest to learn how to measure the system.
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