I am always surprised how much improvement there is to be had still with room acoustics.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wakefield Turntables
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I am always surprised how much improvement there is to be had still with room acoustics.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wakefield Turntables
I am still trying to figure out what happened when I changed the layout of my room recently and its subsequent effect of SQ. I know room acoustics and how your own gear interacts with your room is a very complex subject and indeed many folk have tried to apply measurements and a technical approach to understand what is going on.
Room EQ wizard is the favoured software used by many "measurement" guys out there and indeed I have a mate who uses it to understand his room acoustics but analysing frequency response and subsequent room nodes in regarding to speaker positioning will only get you so far. Yes it will tell you about problem areas at different frequencies ie "Bass humps" etc but what it does not tell you is real life listener experience and impressions. This is where a technical approach runs out of steam in my book. There is nothing like trial and error evaluation done with your own ears that will give you a more accurate understanding of your own system and the sound you are looking for in your own room.
Hence I have gone down the theoretical route a little and implemented some recommended treatments / room / speaker set ups but I have found using my own ears as a tool for telling me what sounds right and what I like is far more effective. This is where it gets tricky as sometimes you don't know how good your system can sound until you try as many combinations of set ups as possible. This can be time consuming and frustrating and with my speakers that why 30+ kilos each, it can be back breaking.
So the other night I left the speakers where they were and moved the other large items in the room instead!:doh:
My initial analysis I posted Sunday but since then I have tried to get my head round what has and is happening which is probably far more complex than I could ever image. Every frequency and its interaction with everything else in the room and the room itself must indeed be unbelievably difficult to map. Move an ornament on the mantelpiece and the sound changes??? - just kidding.:)
However trying to rationalise the implications for the sound difference I am getting is difficult but I will have a go.
My impression is that each frequency carries a certain amount of information the we are uniquely susceptible to and which lights up our brain/hearing. I think this differs for each person and so what sounds great or engaging for one person is different to another hence we all have different gear and different set ups. But I also think what we look for in sound is different. Some folk are turned on by Bass some are turned on by HF detail and so forth.
I know from years of listening my aural perception is turned on by the midrange information and so I have chosen equipment that plays best in this area, after all the human voice operates mainly in this spectrum and this is how our hearing evolved in the first place.
So going back to what I heard. I think the information carried in the midband of frequencies was effected most. I did not hear any more detail as such but what I heard was like opening out a concertina. Everything was there before but now it had room to expand and develop more fully so vocals became more dimensional and the tonal quality of everything in the mix became richer. In short the expansion of the sound opened up the recording. The flatter dimensionality I heard before became more 3D and expansive. This also benefitted the whole soundstage which became more open and as I have mentioned allowed for greater ambience in the room.
To put this very simply it was like I had taken my system out of a smaller room and put it into a larger one!
So whatever I had done to the room acoustics / my listening position / aural perception etc had all changed. As I said to try and unravel all this with measurement and technicalities would probably be very difficult but it is very easy from the end user point of view to hear the effect, at least it was too me.
I got a UMIK-1 measurement mic the other day, intending to see if I can use it over the holidays along with the REW software to find out what is happening in my room.
I don't have any issues with the sound but I got in an argument with some youths who insisted that unless you're using DRC below the Schroeder frequency you can't possibly get a good sound and you will have 15db peaks in the bass.
Okay now when we were starting out a computer with 128K of RAM was a big deal so we had to learn how to treat a room and choose suitable speakers, these kids don't have to do that, they just twiddle a few knobs and hey presto
So my intention is to prove them wrong by showing I get good measured response without all that tech, just using the old skills and experience :)
Ofc I could be wrong and it will measure terribly - but it doesn't sound like it does.
Anyway you're welcome to have a borrow of the mic when I'm done.
That sounds like an interesting Christmas project regardless and may either confirm you have you system set up well or maybe not �� Thanks for the offer to borrow the microphone. I have RW downloaded already from a previous investigation by my mate but I would like another play myself with a mic.Quote:
Originally Posted by Macca
A little more fine tuning with the new room layout and a big surprise. I was listening to a live radio 3 broadcast and decided to just adjust the speaker toe in a little and it turned out to have a more significant impact on the sound than I imagined.
Speaker toe in from my experience is very much dependent on the speaker design with some speakers requiring negligible amount where as others require a fair bit of toe in. I was not sure what my Heco GT 702 speakers were designed to achieve regarding toe in positioning but tonight I found out. Now I must quantify this might be room dependent but I found they definitely sounded way better with minimum toe in. In this position not only was the soundstage and imaging great, the tonal quality was also a lot better. Again something is going on here with the speaker / room interaction.
Tonal quality and layering of the soundstage had already improved with the new room /furniture layout but with this final fine tune everything became that bit sharper into focus. Very obvious when I messed around going back and forth between lots of toe in and almost none. I had always presumed this was a minor function of speaker set up but surprisingly not in my case. Yes its a bit of pain going back and forth toeing in and out but it was certainly very significant and had a much greater impact than I would have imagined.
I will probably have more thoughts on what is going on here when I reflect and process what is happening.
Good result James, nice one.
Played with toe-in with my own setup a couple of Sundays ago James, had similar results.
My speakers have an AMT tweeter/soft dome midrange setup, and can be quite ‘beamy’ in that moving off axis can noticable affect the top end?
Playing with toe-in, like yourself something I hadn’t really looked into, and sound is better in my listening seat.
just dialled in speaker positioning in my room better I guess.
worth spending the time to do definitely.
Good to know I am not the only one who has experimented with toe- in Gary. I have done this before in the past but never focussed on it until the other night where I found the new room configurations affected the sound set up considerably.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazjam
I have soft dome tweeters which are also a tad beamy so I think we have probably had similar issues.
My speakers are now set up with very little toe-in. Is this where you ended up?
Half a lifetime of living with Tannoy dual concentrics taught me to listen virtually on axis to each speaker. I no longer have Tannoys, but still feel most comfortable with speakers toed in this way.
Never had Tannoys Geoff but heard them at a few shows, always wondered what the best set up was for them.Quote:
Originally Posted by walpurgis
My speakers, my room?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimbo
Quite a difference from before actually, speakers were pretty much parallel to the back wall before, after some back and forth now pointed in a fair bit more.
Speaker cable change soon, so moving the speakers again a possibility, but for now sounding great.
Pointed inwards a fair bit, I'd say at a point behind my head when I'm at the sweet spot.
Never paid attention to this stuff before, definitely an improvement.