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My living room eats bass.

6

6mantoys

Well-Known Member
I have recently moved to a new to me house and the living room is 16 by 20.Rectangular with two door ways on each long wall on the same end.There are hardwood floors and the walls are the old cement type plaster.I have tried many different speaker placements and different speakers.Even my cv with 15's are not making bass in the room.I am thinking there is a sonic cancellation happening but don't know where to start to fix it.Any ideas will be welcome.
 
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Use multiple subwoofers. It's one of the only routes to producing high quality bass response in troublesome rooms. What you are more than likely discovering is that the room dominates low bass response and not so much frequencies above a couple of hundred hertz. Consequently, the best position for the drivers producing very deep bass is rarely the best position for the drivers producing the mids and highs. If you don't have a subwoofer and have someone you can borrow from, it will give you a taste of what to expect with multiple subs.

People often fall into the trap of trying stereo subs very close to the mains, but the room is still in control so you are effectively wiping out a lot of the potential you could be gaining with proper placement.
 
Big ol rug is necessary. My room was the same until I got one.

Japanese screen at the back of the room? /\/\/\/\

I think you are going to have to get some wall hangings on the cement / plaster. Of the cloth variety. Course, if you are a bachelor you could probably just put up some real studio style foam traps.
 
Is it only Bass?

Or does your living room devour all types of fish? :scratch2:
 
Hmmm, I'm not sure you can do very much, except for move your seating position. I believe the standing waves will set up the same way, no matter where the signal is launched from. IMO, your best bet is to move your ear to a different location than the cancellation zone.
 
A Room Mode calculator might help you determine what frequencies will be an issue in your room.

http://www.marktaw.com/recording/Acoustics/RoomModeStandingWaveCalcu.html

It looks like 70 and 140 Hz could be a problem, they show up in all three columns on the Axial Mode results. Seeing close or the same frequency multiple times is a red flag. I know just enough to be dangerous, and I don't know what to tell you to do with this information, but there it is. There are some articles linked at the bottom of the calculator.
 
Okay- while the subs in multiple (two good, three better) is most likely the best sution, and room treatments such as bass traps and rugs a nice second, what about adapting an EQ to the room?
 
thedelihaus said:
.., what about adapting an EQ to the room?
Click to expand...

Afaik, using EQ to try to fix a room null is essentially like trying to fill a bottomless pit. No matter how much you throw at it, the cancellations still occur unless you fix the cause of the cancellation.
 
thedelihaus said:
Okay- while the subs in multiple (two good, three better) is most likely the best sution, and room treatments such as bass traps and rugs a nice second, what about adapting an EQ to the room?
Click to expand...

Eq won't work for standing waves. You can increase and increase the output, but a cancellation will null it out. To prevent a standing wave, you need one wall to not reflect the wave back. For bass frequencies, it must be super absorbent. Very difficult with bass frequencies.
 
I've got the same problem in my listening area. Moving the speakers closer to the wall behind them helped quite a bit. I'm talking like inches from the wall. Maybe this would work for you?
 
Pictures of your room In regards to teh dimensions may help. Ive got an oddly shaped room.

Rectangular, with a 2 and a half foot room divider where the kitchen island is. and a short hall way towards the bed room and bathroom. Seems tuned to around 25 and thirty hertz. Funny thing is the bass is just as good where the seating position is. But i get the feeling that the room amay be too small for the bass from the speakers to fully develop as they should.
 
WHOARU, Yes ive herad of car audio subs. There is a 12w7 sub i would love to have that is around 300 dollars. Isnt thir output altered to accomadate the tiny interiors of auto mobiles? But still i would love to have that 13w7 for home theater. box included.
 
BTW, Room dimensions are 14'4" and 27'5" in lengthwitht he hall way at around 12 to 13 feet into the room and the room divider at the half way mark. Still makes for low and deep bass.
 
Most any driver is tailored to its intended purpose. However, that really isn't the point with being able to develop bass in small rooms.

Some are of the opinion that you need a big room so the bass can develop a full wavelength in the room. My only point was that this is wrong because car interiors and headphones are much smaller than the wavelength of low bass frequencies, yet you can hear them. The real problem is canceling reflections.

quoted from "Acoustic Treatment and Design for Recording Studios and Listening Rooms" by Ethan Winer said:
SIDEBAR: BIG WAVES, SMALL ROOMS

There is a common myth that small rooms cannot reproduce low frequencies because they are not large enough for the waves to "develop" properly. While it is true that low frequencies have very long wavelengths - for example, a 30 Hz wave is nearly 38 feet long - there is no physical reason such long waves cannot exist within a room that is much smaller than that. What defines the dimensions of a room are the wall spacing and floor-to-ceiling height. Sound waves generated within a room either pass through the room boundaries, bounce off them, or are absorbed. In fact, all three of these often apply. That is, when a sound wave strikes a wall some of its energy may be reflected, some may be absorbed, and some may pass through to the outside.

When low frequencies are attenuated in a room, the cause is always canceling reflections. All that is needed to allow low frequency waves to sound properly and with a uniform frequency response is to remove or at least reduce the reflections. A popular argument is that low frequencies need the presence of a room mode that's low enough to "support" a given frequency. However, modes are not necessary for a wave to exist. As proof, any low frequency can be produced outdoors - and of course there are no room modes outdoors! Top

Here's a good way to look at the issue: Imagine you set up a high quality loudspeaker outdoors, play some low frequency tones, and then measure the frequency response five feet in front of the speaker. In this case the measured frequency response outdoors will be exactly as flat as the loudspeaker. Now wall in a small area, say 10x10x10 feet, using very thin paper, and measure the response again. The low frequencies are still present in this "room" because the thin paper is transparent at low frequencies and they pass right through. Now, make the walls progressively heavier using thick paper, then thin wood, then thicker wood, then sheet rock, and finally brick or cement. With each increase in wall density, reflections will cause cancellations within the room at ever-lower frequencies as the walls become massive enough to reflect the waves.

Therefore, it is reflections that cause acoustic interference, standing waves, and resonances, and those are what reduce the level of low frequencies that are produced in a room. When the reflections are reduced by applying bass traps, the frequency response within the room improves. And if all reflections were able to be removed, the response would be exactly as flat as if the walls did not exist at all.
Click to expand...

All this, and much more, is explained in the two links I posted early in the thread.
 
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