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RE: yet another post about room placement for Magnepan 1.7s

12.238.8.30

In Reply to: RE: yet another post about room placement for Magnepan 1.7s posted by soleblaze on September 26, 2010 at 20:53:27

Ok, I have my treatments in place and the speakers in the smaller room. I think it sounds pretty good. I don't think I would have been able to get placement correctly with a TV in the center. I'm still tweaking placement of the speakers and the room treatments (gik tritraps in the corners.. I had 2 244 panels behind the loveseat, but I moved them last night.. I feel they're causing the bass to become too uneven. I'm going to have to do some actual room measurements this weekend.)

Currently I feel the bass is pretty tamed, but I won't be able to say for sure without measurements. However, there's a lot of flutter echo due to the small size of the room. I was originally thinking of getting canvas pictures to hang and put some fake trees in. However, I believe I'd get more bang for my buck by building my own traps using 703. I'll be looking at that this weekend.

Is anyone here familiar with room treatments and maggies? I'm not sure whether or not I still want to put absorption on the first reflections and behind the speakers or if that will kill the dipole sound too much.

Follow Ups:

RE: yet another post about room placement for Magnepan 1.7s - josh358 11:48:13 10/07/10 (0)
Treating first reflections on the side walls is optional, dipoles don't radiate much sound in that direction. The most popular treatment is diffusion at the first reflection point behind the speakers. The diffusers don't have to be very big. Line sources don't usually need treatment of the floor and ceiling, beyond the usual rug. Ultimately, it comes down to personal preference, damping early reflections will give you a very solid image and analytical clarity while leaving them alone will provide a sense of space, ambiance, and apparent source width better suited to reproduction of recordings made in large halls.
Another important factor is treble balance, if the room is too bare the sound will be too hot and if it's overdamped the sound will be dull. This can generally be balanced out with furnishings -- stuffed furniture, carpet, heavy drapes. It's also good to have diffusion to take care of the slap echo, book or CD cases are a great way to do this, though you can use diffuser panels if you want.
Any formal room treatment should be flat down to the transition frequency, around 300 Hz. That means 3" thick min absorption or diffusers that are a significant percentage of a wavelength at that frequency (about 3').
Bass is more problematic in a small room. Speaker and room placement can help (25% into the room for the speakers and 50% for the listener is a good starting point, if you can manage it). Your options beyond that are some combination of equalization and bass traps, e.g., tube traps. Without them, don't be surprised to see greater than +/- 10 dB swings in a high resolution response measurement owing to room modes, along with lots of ringing and, if resonances are close to one another in frequency, pitch shift. Midbass is also problematic, owing to proximity effects -- reflections from nearby surfaces.

Edits: 10/07/10

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