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Andrew Haley Andrew Haley is offline
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Default Need advice for a small room

Gary Eickmeier wrote:
"Andrew Haley" wrote in message
...
Robert Peirce wrote:


That's the problem. Apparently, what I am looking for is a speaker
that has an off-axis response very similar to its on-axis response.


In practice that's extremely hard to do: the best you can hope for
is something that's reasonably well-behaved. Even that won't
guarantee you a good soundstage everywhere in the room, because
stereo isn't really adequate for that. A separate subwoofer is
good advice, though, because the ideal speaker placement for lower
bass may not be the same place as that for the rest if the
spectrum.


Not hard to do. It's called an omni.

But omni is not necessarily the ideal radiation pattern. What you
want is time/intensity trading in both the direct and early
reflected domains. This plus a certain speaker positioning scheme
that is very easy to do and very beneficial no matter what speakers
you have. Just think of your walls as mirrors, and position the two
stereo speakers 1/4 of the room width in from side walls and out
from front wall. If you make a drawing of this, you can see that the
two actual and six reflected (virtual) speakers are positioned in an
even lattice equidistant from each other, for a solid, even, deep,
wide soundstage that can "project" any program material like a
3-dimensional canvas on which you paint the recorded sound. Notice
also that we position speakers for imaging, not frequency
response. For that, we can EQ and use subwoofers placed in the
corners of the room.


Well, hold on. Placing the speakers at exactly 1/4 of the room width
is going to maximally excite the second mode. Notching that out isn't
going to be so easy, especially if you want to be able to listen in
more than one position. Placing subwoofers in the corners is
efficient, but it also maximally excites *all* of the room modes.

I repeat to the OP: don't believe any simple solutions. I recommend
CARA http://www.cara.de which alows people to do some simulations.

Andrew.