 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
Alright, settle in, this might take a couple paragraphs.My living room is the only room I have to support my system. Unfortunately it is, acoustically, a riddle wrapped in an enigma.
First off, the dimensions: (roughly)12x14x8. I never know which number is supposed to come first, but anyway the stereo is arranged across one of the long walls. The reason for this is that the living room is the room you walk into when you enter the house. So, imagine this, here is my room: open the front door of the house and, bam, without any foyer or whatever, you're in the living room. The stereo is located against the opposite wall, with a window in the middle of the 12-ft wall to your left and one in the center of the 14 ft. wall behind the stereo, midway between the speakers. Can you picture this? Scintillating, I know. On the wall opposite the speakers, there's a large upholstered couch. I don't know what the fabric is. There's also a good-sized coffee table in roughly the center of the room.
A few more details before I get to the Big Problem. First, there's two paintings behind the speakers, roughly a foot or a little less above them. There's also a cheesy wall hanging behind the couch, and a formica-ish end table next to the couch. Realistically, by the way, there's only about 7 ft. between the speakers and the listening position. Now, here's the Big Problem: the living room opens into the rest of the house via a large archway. So one side of the room is boxed in with a window'd wall, the other wall is practically absent. Two windows, one door, large archway, small room, and, again, the stereo and the couch are set across the long walls. Is this clear so far?
The reason I've gone into such detail is because I had a series of questions and I figured this would be more useful than posting them as discontinuous questions without a frame of reference. Here are my questions (and thanks for having read this far):1. I have an area rug but I'm getting a larger carpet. Is there anything I can put under the carpet as well to increase its absorbency?
2. Would something like RoomLenses help me out with the problem presented by the large archway?
3. The paintings behind the speakers are stretched canvas over large, open wooden frames. If it would help, I could stuff them with any sort of material, but would this help? And if so what kind of material should I use?
4. The coffee table has a piece of glass on it. Should I worry about this?
5. What else should I be thinking about/can I do?My concerns are soundstage and clarity. I think I can do more for the clarity, but in a room this small, can I really improve the soundstage?
At present I have a crap stereo and am slowly building a real-life hi-fi get-up, so the untreated room I'm treating as one of my components and I want to work out a budget.If anyone actually read this whole thing, and if anyone who actually read it responds, THANK YOU VERY MUCH, I deeply appreciate it.
Follow Ups:
...and room treatment contsruction plans if all else fails.> Note: Usual boiler-plate: I neither work for DecWare nor do I have any financial interest, etc., etc.
Hope this helps,
Tinnitus ; )
I'm having difficulty envisaging everything but i've got an L-shaped room with major openings and my previous room was one end of a long room with speakers firing across the short dimension so there was in effect no right side wall. That gives me some experience with part of your problem at least.First, my experience is that large openings on one side do unbalance the sound quite a bit. The tendency is to try and balance things by putting something in the opening but that never seems to work well. I've found that things balance better when you place something absorptive opposite the opening. In my current room, that means around 13 feet of bookcases over 6 ft high, loaded with lots of books. That doesn't balance things entirely perfectly but it helps considerably. In my case, the opening is to the right side so the bookcases are on the left. At the front, behind the speakers, I have large windows which are covered with heavy drapes concealing noise absorbing linings so that most of that wall is absorptive as well. I also have floor to ceiling bass traps in the corners behind the speakers (the only corners I can place traps in). That means that the front and side walls are fairly dead as far as reflections go and that works well - a bit like the old "live end/dead end" recording studio approach.
Instead of book cases you could make up absorbent panels as per Jon Risch's instructions or hang a quilt or carpet, preferably several inches out from the wall and possibly put some noise absorbing curtain liner behind the hanging and out of sight. As a last resort try room lenses along that side to break up, rather than absorb, the sound striking that wall but that won't be as effective as absorption and is likely to be more noticeable than book cases or a wall hanging of some kind.
Now, if I've got things right, I might try rotating your setup. I'd consider putting the speakers against your left wall so that they fire down towards the archway. Depending on the width of the arch, I'd place the listening position in front of it or even right in it, but not behind it in the next room. That means that the right speaker is going to be adjacent to your front door and that's where the possible problem will be - you have to be able to place the speaker somewhere that doesn't block access so a lot depends on where in the wall that door is located and it may simply not be possible, but rotating things 90 degrees that way will give you solid side walls on both sides since the front door is usually closed most of the time, and a solid wall behind the speakers and the big archway in front of them. That promises a much more symmetrical placement which usually helps.
David Aiken
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
