Dear All
Of course our living room is not "difficulat", but it got rather difficult to place my existing speakers, due to unexpected circumstances. I'll give a short summary of the status quo:
1. Room dimensions: app. 6m length and between 4 and 5m in depths (slightly trapezoidal). Height is 2,5 m.
2. Dampening: Southern front completely glassed. This is the wider end of the trapezoid. Northern end is half open (4 steps up to the kitchen and dining area. The two long walls are massive concrete. One wall covered completely with a filled bookshelf from floor to the ceiling and over the whole length. The opposite wall is more or less undampened, just a sofa along the wall and a small corner cupboard.
3. Loudspeaker placement in the past: 1 pair of Linn Keilidhs on the Southern end, directed towards the glass front. That works nicely, when I sit in a cosy chair right opposite and in the center of a slight long triangle.
Another loudspeaker pair (Technics SB-660 on massive stands) was placed in front of the bookshelf-wall and I had a perfect spatial representation, when placed right in the middle of the sofa.
4. The problem: SInce the start of the new year we have a grand piano, which occupies the right hand-side corner of the room, just in front of the windows and 40cm in front of the books. Obviously my right Technics Speaker needed to move. Currently I placed it in the space, where the grand piano gets slimmer at its end. But then the right speaker is about 1.5m nearer to my listening position, than the left speaker AND the distance between the speakers is way too much.
5. First trials: I used a DSP to add a slight delay to the right speaker and reduce its output by 3.5db. That helps somewhat. But the imaging of the speakers is completely gone, it is near impossible to define, where the instruments are located, when listening and the stage center is hardly recognisable. Something that I loved in my old (Pre-piano) set-up.
Now I am thinking of replacing the Technics SB-660 with something like open baffle speakers, because I often read, that they are less difficult to place and still provide spatial resolution. I never heared an open baffle, so it's just an idea I got from reading. On the other hand I love the dynamics of the horn speakers and was originally planning to build a pait of nice bass horns - but I guess, I don't find a good placement for those now.
At least we don't seem to have problems with room modes, at least I didn't hear something... But I guess, that at higher SPL the piano might start to resonate, after all it is meant to do so.
My question would be, wether open baffles or other dipole speakers might solve the placement problem or wether they don't work that way. If not, I would be thankful for suggestions about better speaker placement in our room. Obviously It is near impossible to simply move the left speaker nearer to my listening position (which would get me baclk to the perfect listening triangle), because that speaker would end up in the middle of the room - no way my better half would accept that...
Max
Of course our living room is not "difficulat", but it got rather difficult to place my existing speakers, due to unexpected circumstances. I'll give a short summary of the status quo:
1. Room dimensions: app. 6m length and between 4 and 5m in depths (slightly trapezoidal). Height is 2,5 m.
2. Dampening: Southern front completely glassed. This is the wider end of the trapezoid. Northern end is half open (4 steps up to the kitchen and dining area. The two long walls are massive concrete. One wall covered completely with a filled bookshelf from floor to the ceiling and over the whole length. The opposite wall is more or less undampened, just a sofa along the wall and a small corner cupboard.
3. Loudspeaker placement in the past: 1 pair of Linn Keilidhs on the Southern end, directed towards the glass front. That works nicely, when I sit in a cosy chair right opposite and in the center of a slight long triangle.
Another loudspeaker pair (Technics SB-660 on massive stands) was placed in front of the bookshelf-wall and I had a perfect spatial representation, when placed right in the middle of the sofa.
4. The problem: SInce the start of the new year we have a grand piano, which occupies the right hand-side corner of the room, just in front of the windows and 40cm in front of the books. Obviously my right Technics Speaker needed to move. Currently I placed it in the space, where the grand piano gets slimmer at its end. But then the right speaker is about 1.5m nearer to my listening position, than the left speaker AND the distance between the speakers is way too much.
5. First trials: I used a DSP to add a slight delay to the right speaker and reduce its output by 3.5db. That helps somewhat. But the imaging of the speakers is completely gone, it is near impossible to define, where the instruments are located, when listening and the stage center is hardly recognisable. Something that I loved in my old (Pre-piano) set-up.
Now I am thinking of replacing the Technics SB-660 with something like open baffle speakers, because I often read, that they are less difficult to place and still provide spatial resolution. I never heared an open baffle, so it's just an idea I got from reading. On the other hand I love the dynamics of the horn speakers and was originally planning to build a pait of nice bass horns - but I guess, I don't find a good placement for those now.
At least we don't seem to have problems with room modes, at least I didn't hear something... But I guess, that at higher SPL the piano might start to resonate, after all it is meant to do so.
My question would be, wether open baffles or other dipole speakers might solve the placement problem or wether they don't work that way. If not, I would be thankful for suggestions about better speaker placement in our room. Obviously It is near impossible to simply move the left speaker nearer to my listening position (which would get me baclk to the perfect listening triangle), because that speaker would end up in the middle of the room - no way my better half would accept that...
Max
