[Dave]

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
...
"Dave" wrote in message


I listen to
a lot of female vocalists and piano and these speakers
are designed to reproduce this range admirably.

Well yes, female vocalist means you want smooth midrange but no real bass
required.


Qualifier: female vocalists accompanying jazz trios/quartets/quintets, etc.
often with string bass. So, real bass is required.


However,
now that the honeymoon is over, I am finding them
extremely bright.

(1) Look at speaker placement. SZ's are very dependent on the room
because
they have about as little directivity control as any serious audio speaker
on the market not made by Bose.

(2) Look relative placement w/r/t to the subwoofer and also at the
crossover
with the subwoofer. Close is good. Very close.


I am open to moving them around somewhat. I moved the sub around a fair bit
when I got it as I had heard that the room was likely to have a sweet spot
or two for the sub and that sub placement would make a big difference.
Unfortunately the location of the sub is such that close placement of the
SZs would make for an awkward listening position and unusual aesthetics.
Right now, the sound is relatively good at several listening locations, but
there is one particlar corner where the bass is enormously accentuated.


The SZ's are pretty smooth, but they have no real bass. There are
actually
2 ways for a speaker to be bright, A is to have raised treble, and B is to
have dropping bass. SZs are more B than A. BTW, did I mention the room?


There's no way that you can separate speakers from the rooms they are in,
and there is no way that the wrong speaker for the room is going to sound
good right out of the box.


I am starting to feel that a) the SZ's are a bad match for the room and b)
the room in general is going to be a tough nut to crack as far as
elimination of standing waves and room modes no matter what I do... your
guess as to hardwood floors and sparse furnishings is accurate although
there are some thick-pile area rugs and the furniture style is overstuffed
cloth-covered. The room is nearly square, about 18'x 20' with coved 9'
ceiling. the speakers are about 3' out from the back and sides of the room,
the sub is roughly between them and forward of the SZ's by about 2'.


To me, tubed amps are often random equalizers. Random, because their
actual
equalization effect is not engineered for the specific application.


I am considering DSP EQ. Do you have an opinion? I don't see how it will
fix such a bad room. Given the reflectivity of the majority of the room's
surfaces, getting rid of peaks and dips at one location is unlikely to have
an identical effect at another... although I am quite sure there is much to
the digital wizardry of DSP which I do not comprehend...


It's about the speaker-room interface. If you told me about hardwood
floors
and sparse furnishings, I would not be the least bit surprised. But that's
not the only way to get yourself into trouble with SZs. Put them at the
junction of the ceiling and the wall, or worse yet in a ceiling corner,
and
they probably won't be bright, they may even be boomy and/or have tubby
bass.


What's the BEST location for them? I've described the present location and
they are up on stands at seated ear level. Would I be much better off with
a full-range loudspeaker in this room, or a full-range plus the subwoofer?
The Cornwalls sounded good, but in a very limited area, i.e. they seem to
put out about a 30-degree cone of sound and if you're outside it, the image
and soundstaging just don't happen. when you move into the adjacent
diningroom it's almost like portions of the spectrum disappear.


SZ's are good speakers to feed through an appropriate high pass filter,
because of their non-existent deep bass response and their obvious
power-handling limitations. Appropriate = 140 Hz.


I haven't done any measurements, but found that they sound better, at least
to my ear, when run full-range.

Thank you very much for your informative replies.

Dave