Upside Down Advents

Anybody here experiment with Original Large Advents by placing them on very high stands upside down (tweeters at sitting down ear level position) to see if that helps balance out the sometimes boomy overbearing bass, improving the balance of the overall sound?

havent actually tried it with Advents, but back in my car audio days we would mount the tweeters below the woofers to 'raise' the soundstage. When you're mounting you main speakers down in the kickpanels, ya gotta pull out all the tricks :yes: The physics behind this are explained in 'The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook'. Just getting the speakers a good foot or so off the floor should lean out the bass somewhat . . .

I thought I would get more of a response with this query, as this would seem to be a partial solution to the overly bass oriented problems most people seem to acknowledge the Original Large Advents posses. I would have thought some owners would have tried this, especially since it's such a common practice with stacked Advents. I'm reacquiring a pair from my daughter after a 4 year absence, & in preparation, to test out my theory (it sounds logical on paper), I've set up 2 foot high concrete blocks (at sitting down listening levels, these should be just about parallel to my ears) upon which I intend to place my upside down speakers.

The bass of the large advent is not boomy. Most listeners have never heard the real thing.

Placing them (or any large bookshelf) on good solid 10" stands (or whatever brings the tweeter closest to ear level at a sitting postition, woofer down) and toying with placement away from the rear and side walls should tame any bass overhang.

This sounds more like a room problem and not a speaker problem, IMHO.

Then again, I've never tried inverting large speakers on 24" stands, so what do I know?

ANY loudspeaker can sound boomy when it is placed incorrectly. Some may think it's O.K. to place a typical loudspeaker right next to the floor or other room boundaries like walls because they see subwoofers placed like that. But the thing is, subwoofers only reproduce a small fraction of what a fullrange loudspeaker reproduces, and while subs can also sound boomy, a loudspeaker can get even more boomy because of all the upper bass and other frequencies it is reproducing.

Ever notice that the Boston Acoustics A200 (I think that is the correct model #) has its 10" woofer placed at the very bottom of the cabinet, but the midbass driver and tweeter are way up at the top? And there's all the dual woofer floorstanders (the better ones anyway), including older Infinitys from the early 80s, where the bottom woofer's output is restricted to a narrow band of sound but the upper woofer is allowed to crossover much higher? Same concept.

So it kind of pains me to see these awesome vintage bookshelf speakers stuck on the floor, where the lower bass sounds great but everything above that can get kinda ugly, not to mention the fact that the mid's (if equipped) and tweeter's output is firing into couches and listener's pants legs, something that can have a really negative effect on the speakers' imaging ability. Not to mention the overall sound of the speaker because these drivers' outputs can be partly absorbed by those things, making the speakers' overall sound seem even more lopsided i.e. bass-heavy.

Slightly off-topic subject: this is just a theory on my part but I think the above scenario is partly why so many people think large speakers don't sound as good as small bookshelf-type speakers mounted on stands: it is because the large speakers they have heard were located incorrectly......and this also goes for speakers like the A200s. All that lower bass they can generate - if it isn't emanating from the proper place in the room - can become bloated/boomy/etc & so can pretty much ruin the overall listening experience. So as far as the bass region is concerned, small speakers *seem* like they sound better but that is really only because they are not generating any low bass to get screwed up in the first place (classy technical term eh? :stupid.

So IMO small speakers sound "tighter" simply because they are missing the boominess of an ill-placed large model but when compared to a properly-placed large model, oh boy, there is no contest if you're a fan of bass-heavy rock, pop or whatever. ---> This is why so many people nowadays use subwoofers** for the lowest bass frequencies, because a sub can be placed where the low bass is reproduced best and everyting else is handled by the satellites, which can be placed where they sound best. And when I say "satellite" I mean a speaker that can properly/fully reproduce sounds located around the standard 80Hz xover point so they blend smoothly with a subwoofer and NOT a tiny speaker with a 4 inch "woofer".

I'm done rambling for now.


* this is why it is not a good idea to crossover any sub at too high a frequency - the THX people knew what they were doing when they picked 80Hz (for me 100Hz is when things can finally start getting clearly audibly messy)

** and since most subwoofers are self-amplified, this also means you don't have to invest in a powerful amplifier, which is needed for most large speakers that can get down flat to 20Hz. But getting sats and a sub to blend 100% perfectly can be tricky, so sat/sub systems and a pair of full rangers each have their own sets of advantages & disadvantages.

I don't think the bass on my Advents are boomy or overbearing at all. Just the opposite. I think it's a bit thin. But then again I mainly use it to listen to classical. I've never had them inverted but once I had them on top of some other speakers and it was kinda spooky. Much of the bass disappeared. It was kinda cool. Really light and ephemeral.

The floor is a boundary. Move the Advents up away from it, and the LF drops by 6 dB.

My understanding is that people stack Advents to enhance their bass response via mutual coupling of the two woofers. +3 dB, in theory.

Unfortunately, I'm only too aware of the fact that the room is the single most important component in any system. Therein lies my dilemma. I've had the same pair of Large Advents for decades. When I first bought them, I was fortunate enough to be living in a house with just the right dimensions to allow my Advents to sing..... punchy, tight, clear, fabulous bass especially. Then about 15 years ago, circumstances dictated a move to more of an urban area, into a Railroad apartment, to be more specific, with small square rooms, which is where I currently reside. I've been fighting an uphill sonic battle ever since, never coming up with anything more than a less than satisfying compromise. If I had never heard my speakers in any other environment, I would be convinced that they were the problem, & would probably have spent tons of money & frustrating time chasing down that elusive perfect speaker. Instead, I spent a good deal of time haunting the local library (this was before great internet sites like this existed), reading up on acoustic environments looking for a solution, getting answers I unfortunately didn't want to hear. I let it alone & accept my circumstances for long stretches of time, but every once in a while I get inspired to try something different, hoping against hope that it will at least partially alleviate my acoustic.
P.S. I currently have my speakers as far away from the walls as is possible in such a room, toed in, on 15" high concrete stands.

The "upside down" approach seems worth a try to me. True, just getting the woofer away from the boundary will reduce the bass, but experimenting with different heights, distance from the wall behind, and separation of the two speakers is a way of fine-tuning the speaker to the room. Good luck, and let us know how it sounds to you.