Planar Speaker Asylum Welcome! Need support, you got it. Or share your ideas and experiences.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Planar Speaker Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Trying Limage Speaker Placement

Posted by steven d (A) on April 3, 2017 at 09:30:07

After reading about the Limage speaker placement a couple weeks ago here on the Planar Asylum (in which I do believe I'm fully committed) I thought that I would give it a try to see what the fuss is about.

For reference, my current placement of the Maggie 2.5R had the speakers 6' from the front wall and 5'3" from the side walls with the tweeters inside and toed-in to face the listening position. This gave a nice cohesive sound with very good bass performance and precise imaging, however, because the speaker were in the middle of the room our furniture was positioned oddly to accommodate and this quite a bit of stress from the 'living' perspective; kinda like having a small stone in your shoe.

I knew I didn't have the ideal space for Limage with the open area being 26' x 23', but spending a day with the speakers this way gave me something very different. Lots of space on the stage and the performers were separated to their own place on stage. The stage was massively wide. I also perceived a flatter bass response with deeper extension, something I've not really tried to achieve with any system as I've lived in apartments/condos for the last 13 years. The ribbons sounded less hard and more silky - the space is lively with a concrete ceiling on top, a kitchen to the back, and a glass front wall. I liked that there was a more diffused sound and you you hear music from all around irrespective of where in the space you were.

I liked what I heard enough to continue with dialling in the placement, and with a bit of tweaking I have the speakers now 7' from the front wall/windows, and 10" from the side walls with the tweeter still in. The only problem I was having was the midband was recessed - think of the audiophile "smile" where the frequency extremes are tilted upwards. There's lots of detail but there's no body or souls to the music. Woods aren't woody, vocals are nasally, horns are sharp, snares are thin and on and on. I think this is because of the distance of the speakers and sitting in the dipole null of the more directional frequencies on the midbass panel. The other problem was that there's Imaging hole just either side of centre and if you move an inch ether way the imaging is thrown off.

Primarily, the back of the room (sitting in the kitchen counter lol) provided the most enjoyable sound, but here was something magical about sitting 6' in front of the speaker plane (same distance as the front wall). There was a DEEP stage, rock solid bass but with less extension, and a spooky hologram, but the stage was too wide and there was phasing issue which caused some confusion in the brain about localizing images to sides and slightly behind me.

I was caught between a rock and hard place because there was room filling sound with the Limage placement and we could have our furniture in a peaceful arrangement but the life of the music was gone, and I didn't want to revert to the previous arrangement because I've been sleeping so well for the last week.

Thankfully I had a Klark Teknik DN370 laying around. For those not familiar it's an analog 31-Band graphic EQ with this particular unit having transformer outputs. We gave a small amount of boost to the 100Hz to 1kHz range with the peak boost of about 0.75dB at 500Hz. So, a broad sweep and low amplitude. Woods are woody again, vocals are rich, dynamics of not just the bass but of the rest of the frequency range has improved. I can't explain why, but the centre image is full and there is no loss of continuity for left to right. Maybe the slight phase shift provided by the boost at the EQ has pushed sound towards the centre? Who knows; I'm enjoying it. An added bonus is that sitting anywhere between the kitchen counter and the magic spot now yields pleasuring sound, the sweet spot is bigger.

Though it's not perfect and still requires fine tuning what this has done has fleshed out the entire sound of the room. I wish I had the time and patience to set up the mic and run REW but sometimes it's just nice to adjust by ear and enjoy what you gots.While there's still a process to undertake to achieve perfection, I can now, finally, have more of what I've been looking for from my music playback system: warm tone, dynamics, details, large scale, happy neighbours.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Kimber Kable

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---