Home Tweakers' Asylum

Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

Re: Glad to be engaged in decent audio discussions with you.

"When a blockade stand is recommanded for a loudspeaker, to me it is somewhat not in line of physics. Either the design needed a blockade stand to flatten up its frequency response, or for whatever reasons."

Well, designers do at times design speakers specifically for placement close to walls. Rooms in the UK are often smaller than in the US or here in Australia and some English speakers have been designed for placement against a wall simply to make it easier for people to use them in small rooms. A lot of the BBC studio designs are designed to work very well close to or against walls simply because studio space can be extremely limited, especially a mobile studio, and on occasion can make a small room seem like ample space by comparison. Roy Allison designed a range of speakers years ago that were designed to be placed against walls in order to work with, rather than against boundary effects. And, of course, Paul Klipsch designed the classic Klipschorn for corner placement so that the walls effectively expanded the size of the horn mouth.

I think a good speaker is one that's designed to work well in the sort of placement for which it is designed and I'd actually like to see a little more work done on designing speakers for use closer to, against, or even in walls.

One good thing about the expanding home theatre market is that we are now starting to see more attention being given to such speakers. If it's sometimes hard to place 2 speakers far enough out into the room in order to get them performing at their best, it's considerably harder, probably a fair bit more than twice as hard, to get 5 speakers far enough away from the walls to sound their best while still keeping them all far enough away from the listening position to allow proper driver integration and to also allow seating for quite a few more people than often want to listen to music. You really start to need a quite large room to accommodate a 5.1 surround system with speakers placed well away from walls and it gets worse again as you move up to 6.1 and 7.1 systems. Just to throw an element of nightmare into this scenario, a day or two ago I read an interview with Tolminson Holman of THX fame who was talking about work on a 10.2 system. I've got a separate AV system which is 5.1 channel and based around 2 pairs of identical floorstanders for the front and surround channels, and that system looks a little like Easter Island on a bad day. Doing 10.2 with freestanding speakers would be my idea of hell. I'm forced into using free standing speakers for the 5.1 system, however, because that system is in an open plan area where there is no right wall between the space where the system is set up and the dining area adjacent. The only reason I can get away with it is because my wife isn't around or it would be a 3.1 system at most. There are definitely advantages to living alone

I've always had a dedicated room for the 2 channel audio system since moving to this huse, and I've always had the speakers out in the middle of the room in an Audio Physic style setup here. To some degree that's really 'letting your freak flag fly' as David Crosby once put it. I really enjoy the sound of that system and appreciate the benefits that came with being able to get the speakers much further away from the walls than they were in my previous home, but I'm also practical enough to acknowledge that most people don't have a room where they can put the speakers 2 metres in front of one wall and 1.3 metres or so away from the side walls. In a lot of cases, up against the walls or tucked into the corners would genuinely be the most practical placements from a utilitarian viewpoint. It's good to actually see more attention being given to 'real world' friendly placement options, even if they're not what I'm looking for for either of my systems.

David Aiken


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  • Re: Glad to be engaged in decent audio discussions with you. - David Aiken 17:14:29 03/15/07 (0)


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