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In Reply to: Whats Next after Ref 3A de Capos? posted by A4 Owner on May 26, 2003 at 17:35:23:
including you. You said it yourself "your room is not great" - You have tried out a number of top flight speakers and you keep moving on and you will keep moving on as a result.Get a professional dealer to investigate your room and take appropriate steps to increase the quality of the room as a listening environment...great speakers won't be great in bad rooms. The De Capo you say you've had about a year and that's the LONGEST in the past 7-8 years. My Heaven MAN shake your head in shame!!!! There is something wrong there and it isn't the speakers...sure the odd one but several top flight speakers all not good enough.
You seem to want the qualities of the De Capo(Dynamics and transparency) but you want the fuller warmth of the spender(less dynamic and less transparent). One reason I like the HD600 headphone is that it gives me 95% of the electrostatic presentation with dynamics...but the can is analytical...so I match a tube amp with them to fatten up the midrange a bit.
Before you go chasing after every new speaker that gets a good review like a dog chases every new car that rolls down the street - take a step back and determine what the real problem is. You don't have to follow the BUZZ words of transparency and detail etc...what you need to do is enjoy the music. And sometimes a more enjoyable speaker can be obtained with objectively worse numbers. I have had my speakers ten+ years and they have big disadvantages in a number of aspects to most new speakers(in fact my lowly B&W 302s have certain advantages at 1/10 the price)...notably my Wharfedales have a personality. The point though is that I have heard a LOT of speakers that are tempting but are missing certain things I want. You should not take a step back in parts of the sound when buying a new speaker just because it's better in certain things...it should be better in all things.
Speakers above the De Capo I have found to have a significantly high level of diminishing returns for improvements gained. Detail and transparency are fine - some do it better - but if it does not move you then they are valueless IMO.
I am biased because I love the De Capo (i) - I would be looking at your amp your source and most importantly your room/set-up. Wrm up the mid range with tubes if you must...and not all tube amps warm up the sound...I have run across several that sound mre analytical than several Solid state amps from the likes of Sugden and Creek etc. Thiel and B&W if anything make even more analytical speakers and I find Vandersteen, generally, to be lacking life.
Follow Ups:
Thanks for your comments. I agree that enjoyment of the music is what it is all about. As far as the room, my main complaint is it is simply too small to handle the dynamic range I am looking for. When I had an apt. years ago, it was relatively small but had one large living room, w/ vaulted ceilings. Once I moved to my house, an older home w/ a number of smaller rooms, I was never able to recreate the sound I was getting in the apt. My listening room is 13 X 15 w/ normal ceilings. In fact, I found that almost all decent sized floorstanders overloaded the room; that's why I eventually went to stand-mounted speakers. I am also limited in terms of moving gear around in the room by several factors I simply can't avoid, so that room placement may not be ideal. I'm not in a position to simply tear down the room and build a new one, so I pretty much have to live w/ what I have until I move to another house. I suspect that the Ref 3As, like some of the floorstanders I've had, is testing the limits of my room on LF response. As far has having a dealer look at the room, I've discussed the issue w/ several dealers, but none have offered solutions that I could realistically implement. It may be that I need some acoustical treatment, but I've always been a little suspicious of such treatments, plus I'm not sure that there is a local dealer selling such products, that I feel confortable enough w/ to try the product.
As to the speakers I've tried, for the most part each of the speakers I upgraded to I thought overall was an improvement over the prior speaker. In two cases, after living w/ the speaker for a time, I decided I just didn't like it (Totem/Meadowlark). The other upgrades involved going to a different price point (Linn Tukans/Spendor S3/5s to Spendor 2/3s, Spendor 2/3s to Ref 3A.) I do, however, like the suggestion of an older pair of Quads. However, I've heard the current production Quads, which I found neutral and musical, but not necessarily the most "enjoyable" to listen to, if that makes sense.
Terry
" I suspect that the Ref 3As, like some of the floorstanders I've had, is testing the limits of my room on LF response"?If you mean that the standing wave generated by the longest dimension is too high and that the room won't support lower frequencies so you can't hear low bass in a room the size of yours, you're dead wrong. Take a listen to subwoofer bass in a car - the space does not have to have a dimension equal to or longer than the longest sound wave you want to listen to.
You can get bass as low as you want in your room but the room won't reinforce it and that's actually a good thing since reinforcement is due to standing waves and they aren't desirable. What you are going to get, and what everybody gets, is erratic behaviour below 200 -300 Hz or so due to emphasis of certain frequencies - the room nodes or standing wave frequencies - and cancellation at other frequencies determined by the placement of the speakers and the listening position. The frequency range in which these effects are worse is determined by your room dimensions and where the speakers are placed within the room. These effects can be tamed but not entirely eradicated. I would expect the results in your room with 2 dimensions nearly the same and the other close to half of the longest dimension, to be difficult but things can be done.
A lot of the problem can be solved by careful speaker placement and selection of the listening location. These can be chosen to minimise the effects of the rooms nodal behaviour. Given the size of the room, setting things up for near field listening would make a lot of sense - that means you end up listening to a mix of sound that's predominantly direct sound and the contribution of the reflected sound, which is the sound that has been affected by the room, is minimised. What you hear that way is going to be closer to the speaker's anechoic response than what a microphone would measure because the brain does things with how it perceives sound due to arrival time and level and maximising the direct sound contribution really does help there. Listening in the near field also means you're a bit closer and don't have to turn the volume up to get the same level of sound, so you don't run the same risk of coming up against the issue of simply overloading the room.
Combine that with a bit of DIY acoustic treatment (see Jon Risch's home pages listed in the FAQs here and an Tweaker's Asylum) and you'll smooth out the room response some more. In the end, an uneven room response isn't as bad as you might think and it's surprising how our brain seems to accommodate it and how we don't notice it anywhere near as much as we think we should when we look at measurements of a frequency sweep taken in the room.
If you're changing gear as frequently as you say you do, you have to be chasing something that you can't get with gear changes. Either it is something like the room or a component you haven't looked at, or it's something in what you're looking for that is simply unrealistic and unattainable within your price range or possibly even at any price range. Other possibilities besides the room for areas other than components where you may not have looked are control of vibration and resonances, and cleaning up the power supply to your gear. It's amazing what both of these can do to clean up sound, change the way you perceive some frequency ranges, and let you listen at softer levels since you're no longer including noise in the signal you amplify and you no longer need to turn things up to hear detail that has been masked by noise to some degree. You may well find what you're lacking with your current gear simply by addressing one or more of room acoustics, vibration and power. You'll definitely find a lot that you didn't know was there with your gear and that may be even more satisfying in the long term than what you're currently chasing.
Those are interesting points, and different than what a couple dealers had suggested to me in the past re: LF response. I'm sure that the topic of speaker placement has been covered a number of times here, but do you have any specific suggestions or references that you could point me to? I've tried the "rule of thirds" as I understand it, but find that set-up is not ideal in my room. I've generally preferred the speakers either closer to the wall (warmer, fuller) or pulled out a little more into the room (better image behind speakers, a little cleaner sounding). Also, because of furniture, TV, doors, windows, electrical outlets, etc., I have to place my speakers against the long wall (ie, 15 ft.) rather than the short wall (ie., 13 ft.). Thanks,
Terry
Re low bass in rooms - I think this is one of the areas that is subject to gross misunderstanding. Very low bass can be heard in small spaces - listening to even a normal setup without subwoofer in a small car should be enough to convince anyone of this. If you couldn't hear notes with a wavelength longer than the room's longest dimension, you shouldn't be able to hear notes lower than 75 Hz (a 15 ft wavelength) in your room and that means you couldn't hear the lowest octave on a double bass or bass guitar, or even the bottom octave and a bit of a piano. You also wouldn't be able to hear notes lower than 150-200 Hz in a small car which means you wouldn't even be able to hear the lowest notes of some singers, much less almost any note from a double bass or bass guitar. I can assure you that all of those ranges are audible in your room and in a small car, and ranges even lower than those as well. A bit of listening should convince absolutely everyone of this fact but for some reason this belief never goes away.For what it's worth, I can hear test tones down to 31.5 hz in my room which is where my speakers roll off too far for audibility. The wavelength of a 31.5 Hz note is around 36', far longer than any dimension of my room which is around 17' by 13', not much bigger than yours, with a 10' by 10' extension opening off the long wall on one side so the longest dimension is actually 23', a long way short of the wavelength of a 31.5 Hz note. The low frequency limit in your room is set by the speaker's performance, not the room's dimensions. I also place the speakers on the long side - that isn't a problem.
I use the Audio Physic method with speakers half way between the front and back walls and listen against the wall or rather where the wall would be if my room didn't take a bit of a bend there. My speakers are placed at quarter points from the side walls. You can use this kind of approach and place the speakers a quarter of the way from front to back instead of half way. It works well for me in my room, but speakers in the centre of the room don't work well in a living room. My room serves only as a listening room so speaker placement isn't an issue.
Other grids include a grid of quarters rather than the thirds you've tried.
There are other methods not based on grids like the Cardas which uses a mathematical formula and which I think doesn't come up with useable placements in a small room that is close to a square - it's based on a rectangular room with dimensions ideally related to each other by a factor of approx. 1.61. There's also the Wilson method which involves a process of listening and marking off on a grid pasted to the floor. There are links to all of these in the FAQ. There are also placements along a diagonal which can be good in rooms that are square or almost so, and there's some mention of them in the material on the Harmon Kardon site. I haven't tried that approach but Floyd Toole seems to like it.
What all of these methods are going to do is to reinforce or cancel various room nodes and frequencies to different degrees. One will work best in one room and another will work best in a different room. The dimensions of your room play a huge part in which will work best for you. There's also the issue of which methods are practical in your room - what works in a dedicated listening room may not work in a living room where furniture and other uses dictate that the speakers simply won't go in some locations, regardless of how desirable the sound improvement would be.
There are links to most of these methods in the FAQ.
Also, on the Rives Audio site (don't have a URL but you can do a google search) they have a scaled down version of the CARA software that allows you to experiment with various placements and see what their effect will be on a range of speakers. If your speaker is on their list, you're in luck. Otherwise I'd pick a speaker of a similar physical size and frequency response and play with that to get a rough idea.
Apart from the above and the FAQ, you're going to have to work it out yourself given your room and the uses you make of it.
David Aiken
David,Thanks very much. This is very useful information, and gives me a lot to work with.
Please keep changing equipment often and let us know so that we can pick up the leftovers (cheap).Sounds like you have a serious case of audiophilihtis. You need to love music for the sake of music more. Spend your more of your budget on concert tickets and music appreciation classes. Playback systems are primarily supposed to remind you of "real" music, not perfectly reproduce it.
From what I see some people spending on gear, I thought I was a "budget" guy. I actually shop carefully, buying mainly demo or used gear or closeouts, taking my time, and usually buying though local dealers when they have a deal available, so I can hear the gear first. As a result, I rarely lose much when I sell to trade up. In fact, I created a spreadsheet earlier this year showing what I had spent, and what I had sold gear for when I traded up, over the last 5-6 years. When I looked at the total difference, it was substantially less, divided into a monthly basis, than the $50 + I pay per month for cable. Yet, I get a lot more enjoyment out of my audio system than 250 channels of mainly junk on cable. I call that a deal!I think some people have confused my request. I'm not saying that I think my current system is bad or not enjoyable. In fact, in every way I can think of it is better than anything I've owned before. I've heard a lot of other speakers locally, both in dealers and in private homes, and while some of them in the same price range (Reynaud, Audio Physic, Harbeth, Thiel, Maggys, JM Lab) do some things that the Spendors and Ref 3As don't do quite as well, and all are excellent speakers, I'm not sure that I believe any of them are a clear step up overall over the de Capos or my main alternative in that price, the Spendor 1/2s. I do like the $7000 Living Voice Avatar OBX speakers that my local dealer has, but there is no way I will ever spend that much on speakers, unless I win the lottery (which I don't play). I was mainly soliciting thoughts of ways to upgrade/tweak my system w/out spending a fortune. Also, there was a pair of Ref 3A Integreles (?) on Audiogon for $1995 (maybe still there). I was thinking of selling my de Capos to purchase them, as it would not cost a great deal to make that upgrade, if I could get a fair price for my de Capos.
In retrospect, I think two reasons I'm a little unsatisified right now that I did not fully disclose: (1) I've sold off my analog system, and need to get back into analog, since that has always been my primary source; I was happier w/ my system last winter when I had a Michell Gyro/SME 309 w/ VDH & Clearaudio carts. I sold the Gyro because it was a little frustrating to try to set up properly; every time I thought it was close to just right, I would try to tweak it more, and would throw the set-up off. But when it was right, the combo of the Gyro/Avatar/de Capos was one of the best systems I've heard at any price. I wanted an Orbe, but could not justify to myself spending that much $$$. (2) I've been playing w/ tube rolling in the Avatar, w/ mixed results. As w/ the Gryo, every time I think I'm about "there", I make some more changes and find I am a little disappointed w/ the result. Perhaps these questions are better addressed to the Vinyl and Tube asylums, respectively, where I mainly hang out. Thanks for all your suggestions, particularily the ones about room setup/treatments.
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