canuckaudiog
On a quest for high fidelity
@canuckaudiog brilliant read, thanks for that. I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered the MiniDSP UMIK-1, I’m struggling to get imperical results (just subjective) and believe this will let me truly work out how it’s performing in all my listening positions and with various speakers and subs in various setups too.
Without 3 subs I’m a little at the mercy of speaker and sub placement however getting good bass out of the LS50’s has certainly helped with more options as I’m not reliant on the subs only to fill in the bottom end (I’m still blown away by how much bass the LS50’s produce!).
I’ll be interested to see:
1. How my impressions of my current setup compare to a proper measurement (I feel a bit of a mid bass hole I would guess around 150hz)
2. How my everyday listening setup compares to my audio setup/position (I think there’s a sub bass hole below 80hz)
I’ll also be keen to see if recapping my KA-8100 does anything to the frequency response too. I have some interesting times ahead.
Now we're talking! Buying the UMIK-1 has been one of the best purchases I've ever made. Figuring out where the problems are in my room has been invaluable in figuring out what to do. When you get it let me know, I'll throw you some resources your way that you can use to start using it right away. It's a very handy tool to have.
I imagine what you're going to discover is you will have a valley somewhere in your frequency response. i.e., the room mode. For me it's about 55Hz (then 110Hz, and so on and so forth), for you it'll likely be somewhere around there, depending on the size of your room. Mine is 13'x16'x7.3'.
So far, I've been able to learn two major things with it. One is obviously the bass response in my room. The other is I learned the importance of getting the speakers exactly the same distance from each other and the walls. The treble response would go from having a severe, 6dB dip at around 10-15kHz, to being ruler flat. And the sound reflected that as well - everything sounded much clearer and defined once I broke out the tape measure and got the speakers to be within a percentage of each other.
If you have any questions about it just let me know, I'll be happy to help. I look forward to seeing the frequency response plot of your system.