New speakers for awkward loft room

[Dwaindibly]

Hi im looking to upgrade the speakers in my loft room i currently have q acoustics 3030i paired with a marantz pm 6007 and a sub.The room is treated as best as possible and i will be changing the diffuser on the rear wall to a skyline diffuser .I'm pretty limited on speaker position as they are on the rear wall 2m apart but close to side walls. The loft space is around 2.2m x 11m what im looking for is a wider soundstage and more separation if thats possible!! I have a solid phantom centre and some separation so I was wondering if changing my speakers would help maybe I've been looking at kef Q1 metas new and kef LS50s used ?

 

[alex-z]

Only way to realistically widen the stereo imaging in such a small room is cardioid radiation pattern. That will limit the side and rear wall reflections in the mid-bass region.

 

[Chris A]

This is what a friend did with his room treatments before he started to get some sort of reasonable imaging, soundstage, and tonal balance. The problem is the canted ceiling that's so close to your ears. (He actually added more absorption area later to both the walls and ceiling.)

The loudspeakers he uses here have very good vertical directivity control down to ~1.5 kHz. Below that frequency, the need for controlling early ceiling and sidewall reflections becomes the driving performance factor. That makes the acoustic treatments even larger in order to absorb and diffuse those frequencies.

All of these acoustic room treatments were added based on both subjective listening performance and via REW measurements (lots of measurements, in fact).

YMMV.

Chris

 

[Chris A]

It might be much easier to find another room that's shoebox shaped (with minimum dimensions on the order of 4 m) rather than go down the path of trying to treat your present listening room...

...or use headphones.

Chris

 

[Cote Dazur]

The loft space is around 2.2m x 11m

So that means those speakers and the seat can be moved back into the room.
You do not need a sub in that room. just place the speakers better.
Closer to each other, away from the back wall, seat closer to the speakers.
Try it, it is free.
You are lucky, you have a dedicated room, world is your oyster, be bold.

 

[Chris A]

I found the picture I was looking for--after all the measurements and tweaking:

The problem will not go away because of the power of positive thinking or even just changing the loudspeakers, I've found (with all due respect to Dr. Peale, RIP).

Chris

 

[Dwaindibly]

I found the picture I was looking for--after all the measurements and tweaking:

The problem will not go away because of the power of positive thinking or even just changing the loudspeakers, I've found (with all due respect to Dr. Peale, RIP).

Chris

Blimey thats a lot of treatment!! Think I'll keep it as is I've only got 1.8m of head room !!

 

[Duke]

... what im looking for is a wider soundstage and more separation if thats possible!!

You might try sitting closer to the speakers. This will widen the "stereo triangle" and should give you a correspondingly wider soundstage.

Strong, early same-side-wall reflections tend to widen the soundstage, so take that into account. It may be that moving the speakers towards your chair makes more sense than moving your chair towards the speakers from the standpoint of getting strong early same-side-wall reflections, depending on what the side walls are like where the reflections occur. I have found that, in general, moving speakers further out from the wall behind them tends to increase the soundstage depth, if that's a consideration.

You might want to reduce the amount of toe-in, as this will increase the strength of those (arguably-desirable-in-this-context) early same-side-wall reflections.

Also, I would be tempted to try sitting lower, closer to the floor, and thus farther from those ceiling angles and their unusually short reflection path lengths.

As for which speakers, I don't have a specific model in mind. Imo wide-and-fairly-constant directivity probably makes sense given your priorities. Maybe even with narrowed vertical directivity, as I don't think strong early reflections off those ceiling angles are desirable.

 

[Flaesh]

But this attic is a little bigger