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Room set-up advice

OldUI11

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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.
 

Cote Dazur

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Good questions and concerns. First the easy answer, your Canton Vento 876.2 are going to be adequate for the job and not the limiting factor.
How the room will be furnished and where the speakers and chair are going to be located will either allow them or prevent them to do a good job.
You found the right place (forum) to get a lot of judicious advice to help you on your journey.
A thread in this forum on “how not to do it” has gathered a lot of attention, you might want to read it, it will probably confuse you at first, but hopefully also help you understand that their is no easy answer and that you will need to study a bit to get what is important to you. Good luck.
 

ozzy9832001

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Well, my thoughts are the following:

1) Unless the carpet is super thick, it won't really do a huge amount for any acoustics in the room. At best it will help a bit with flutter echo and the highest frequencies and of course, help the decor of the room. That's my belief and my own experience. Others will probably debate this.

2)My current office setup is along the long wall of the room. I found everything sounded better and the bass response for the room was better. I'm also asymmetrical in side wall distances. Dirac fixes that with a small delay on 1 speaker and a small gain reduction. Though you don't need dirac to make those adjustments. I barely notice it. The room will dictate where the speakers are best. You'll have to try many, many positions to find the best.

Using dirac or rew to get some measurements will be a good starting point.

3)The ceiling room modes are ones we all have to deal with. The worst offenders are going to be your oblique modes as they excite very easily and cause the most noise. For me, my issue with the ceiling is the 70hz mode causing issues at 140 (common in US because we love 8' ceilings for some reason). Dirac or manual eq squashes that peak.

At the end of the day, the best thing to do is not buy anything new until you've taken proper measurements and given it a listen for a week or so. Let your ear adjust to the different space. You may find the room coloration is appealing. You may find it's not. Your room is a good size compared to most, so room modes may not be as big an issue. My office is smaller, 9.5ftx11ftx8ft.

You may also find that spending some money on some acoustic panels and/or bass traps may improve the sound more than a new set of speakers would.
 
OP
O

OldUI11

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Well, my thoughts are the following:

1) Unless the carpet is super thick, it won't really do a huge amount for any acoustics in the room. At best it will help a bit with flutter echo and the highest frequencies and of course, help the decor of the room. That's my belief and my own experience. Others will probably debate this.

2)My current office setup is along the long wall of the room. I found everything sounded better and the bass response for the room was better. I'm also asymmetrical in side wall distances. Dirac fixes that with a small delay on 1 speaker and a small gain reduction. Though you don't need dirac to make those adjustments. I barely notice it. The room will dictate where the speakers are best. You'll have to try many, many positions to find the best.

Using dirac or rew to get some measurements will be a good starting point.

3)The ceiling room modes are ones we all have to deal with. The worst offenders are going to be your oblique modes as they excite very easily and cause the most noise. For me, my issue with the ceiling is the 70hz mode causing issues at 140 (common in US because we love 8' ceilings for some reason). Dirac or manual eq squashes that peak.

At the end of the day, the best thing to do is not buy anything new until you've taken proper measurements and given it a listen for a week or so. Let your ear adjust to the different space. You may find the room coloration is appealing. You may find it's not. Your room is a good size compared to most, so room modes may not be as big an issue. My office is smaller, 9.5ftx11ftx8ft.

You may also find that spending some money on some acoustic panels and/or bass traps may improve the sound more than a new set of speakers would.
Thanks, Cote Dazur, I've been reading the thread with interest.

I'm happy to hear that neither you (Ozzy) nor Cote Dazur think there is any reason to start with a change in kit. I am likely to buy a home theatre receiver at some point to enable a 3.2 set-up (and possibly home theatre in future), and I'd be happy to save my budget for that. However, in the short run my main interest is setting up a 2.1 (or 2.2...) system focused on music. My current set up is slighly asymmetic, and Dirac seems to have done a good job compensating. It's interesting to hear about the fairly standardised ceiling height. It's similar in many places I've been in Europe, where the standard 'not high' ceiling is around 2.4/2.5 metres (which is roughly 8 ft). Where we live at the moment the ceiling is somewhat higher than that.

I recall reading somewhere in these forums that the research had suggested that listeners were not very bothered by floor bounce. My thinking was just that since we may be installing carpet anyway just in that room, I could do try to do it in a useful way. If not, then of course that is yet one less thing to worry about.

My plan is to take measurements with REW and Dirac. If the best thing is to use software room correction/bass integration and to see if there are some straightforward acoustic treatments, then that's great. Perhaps since the room is not especially short in the short dimension (4 metres or about 13'), it won't be a significant probaly not to have things arrayed along the short wall.

Thanks again to both of you. I'll keep on reading, too!
 

Cote Dazur

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spiral scratch

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My god! Talk about a flaming tangential. I guess it talks about room treatments at some points but a whole lot of discourse on credibility. As Amir pointed out it is a shill piece so not sure why people were taking it on one way or the other. I will give it a few more pages, not sure I can make through 64.
 

Keith_W

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My god! Talk about a flaming tangential. I guess it talks about room treatments at some points but a whole lot of discourse on credibility. As Amir pointed out it is a shill piece so not sure why people were taking it on one way or the other. I will give it a few more pages, not sure I can make through 64.

Read the first 2 pages, then ignore the next 10. Read p12-20. After that it's more or less a rehash of information already given.
 

youngho

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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.
Toole suggests thick felt underlay.
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.
This is not typically advised by most, but if you can pull the speakers way out from the wall, and if you're sitting close to the wall behind you, this is the method that was advocated by Joachim Gerhard (https://www.researchgate.net/public...ENT_FOR_OPTIMISED_PHANTOM_SOURCE_REPRODUCTION) when he was at Audio Physic (can Google), which many listeners found to provide exemplary imaging qualities.
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.
Probably should wait until after you move to make a decision like this.

Young-Ho
 
OP
O

OldUI11

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Toole suggests thick felt underlay.

This is not typically advised by most, but if you can pull the speakers way out from the wall, and if you're sitting close to the wall behind you, this is the method that was advocated by Joachim Gerhard (https://www.researchgate.net/public...ENT_FOR_OPTIMISED_PHANTOM_SOURCE_REPRODUCTION) when he was at Audio Physic (can Google), which many listeners found to provide exemplary imaging qualities.

Probably should wait until after you move to make a decision like this.

Young-Ho
Thanks for this. It's very helpful. I read the linked article. That's interesting. Between the thread linked above and this, I have a few ideas about what to try initially. I'll see how things sound with the current speakers and take some measurements.
 

youngho

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Hi, as you can see, this basically flips the standard recommendations on their head. The primary early reflection happens between 1-3 ms, so after the critical 1 ms window for Haas effect but under 5 ms, contains the full frequency spectrum of the direct on-axis signal except for pinna shadowing (as opposed to sidewall reflections typically rolling down with increasing frequency for speakers without constant directivity, floor or ceiling reflections with driver cancellations if not coaxial designs, etc), and arrives from a direction not likely to have detrimental effects on spatial perception. There is also boundary reinforcement of low frequencies (minus the SBIR related to listener position relative to rear wall, but elsewhere I have seen him suggest some damping material directly behind the listener, and the proximity pushes up the SBIR effect to more manageable frequencies), as well as more potential for enhancing spatial bass perception as discussed by David Griesinger: http://www.davidgriesinger.com/asa05.pdf). Good luck!
 
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OldUI11

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Hi, as you can see, this basically flips the standard recommendations on their head. The primary early reflection happens between 1-3 ms, so after the critical 1 ms window for Haas effect but under 5 ms, contains the full frequency spectrum of the direct on-axis signal except for pinna shadowing (as opposed to sidewall reflections typically rolling down with increasing frequency for speakers without constant directivity, floor or ceiling reflections with driver cancellations if not coaxial designs, etc), and arrives from a direction not likely to have detrimental effects on spatial perception. There is also boundary reinforcement of low frequencies (minus the SBIR related to listener position relative to rear wall, but elsewhere I have seen him suggest some damping material directly behind the listener, and the proximity pushes up the SBIR effect to more manageable frequencies), as well as more potential for enhancing spatial bass perception as discussed by David Griesinger: http://www.davidgriesinger.com/asa05.pdf). Good luck!
Thanks for this too – another interesting read! I'm looking forward to starting on the project of getting the new room in order. The move is a few months away, but I'll report back once it's set up.
 
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