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RE: I have a hunch.

Posted by Swamis Cat (A) on November 22, 2015 at 11:25:10

In Reply to: RE: I have a hunch. posted by josh358 on November 21, 2015 at 17:55:32:

"I've never heard them pulled out too far, because I've never had a listening room large enough! In the rooms I've had, the farther the better."

Yeah, I have a twenty foot room, a thirty five foot finished basement, and an alcove which opens up to an area of more than ten thousand cubic feet of space. The speakers gain depth, but lose transient snap and dynamics as you move them out too far. The tradeoffs is more severe for the newer 3.7 i's with tape (suppressing back wave) than with older IIIa's. However the tradeoffs in my opinion starts at about five or six feet.




"Magnepan designs for an average room"

Yeah, and I suspect they design/optimize for an "average" distance from the FW, and that they are specifically reducing that distance over the decades to make their speaker more WAF friendly. My guess is the tape on the new I models is part of this trend.


"...always seemed to me that the sense of depth was a compromise between the distance to the rear wall and the recording venue -- my brain seems to split the difference."

Yeah, this sounds right to me too.

".... modern control rooms use a reflection-free zone, which is essentially equivalent to speakers that are far from the wall with lots of diffusion behind them, and they don't lose attack -- they tend to sound very clinical because they have a low Rt time, a drier acoustic than most home rooms have or should have. So what I'm wondering is whether the problem with moving the speakers out is that the room is too reverberant?"

Maybe, or maybe it is due to the tradeoffs in WHAT is being reverberated. If you get it too far from the FW, it seems to shift to lower, muddier reverberation. Indeed, one trick some find to add snap further from the FW, is to move it closer to the SW. Obviously Limage uses this, but another version I have used is the one where you align the speaker at a 45 degree angle near the SW, allowing a gain of energy off the side wall. I have no idea why this works, but it does tighten things up a bit if out beyond eight or ten feet. The problem is you get an echoey effect.

I actually suspect the issue is rooms are not reverberant enough, at least at higher frequencies. A lot of Limage setups seem to me to be in bright under damped rooms and Limage discourages FW treatment.

Questions....

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