spkr-place

Imagine on Mobile Fidelity from 1984

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of John Lennon Available Now

This Jack Hunt-mastered Half Speed has the midrange suckout that Mobile Fidelity was notorious for.

Lennon and his piano on the first track sound like they are coming from another room.

And yet somehow there are still “audiophiles” in this day and age that defend the records put out by this ridiculous label.

Oy vey. What is wrong with these people?

I Have a Theory

Actually, I have a good idea why so many so-called audiophile records have a sucked-out midrange.

A midrange suckout creates depth in a system that has difficulty reproducing depth.

Imagine that instead of having your speakers pulled well out from the back wall as they should be, instead you have placed your speakers right up against the wall.

This arrangement, though preferable aesthetically and dramatically more family- and wife-friendly, has the unfortunate effect of seriously limiting your speakers’ ability to reproduce whatever three-dimensional space exists on your recordings.

I hinted back in 2022 that I was going to discuss this idea down the road, and like most things that I was supposed to write about down the road, we’re still waiting to see it.

The album I was going to write more about was Kind of Blue.

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Speaker Placement — The Room Coupling Method

Robert Brook runs a blog called The Broken Record, with a subtitle explaining that the aim of his blog is

A GUIDE FOR THE DEDICATED ANALOG AUDIOPHILE

We know of none better, outside of our own humble efforts to enlighten that portion of the audiophile community who love the sound of music reproduced with the highest fidelity and, more importantly, are serious enough to be willing to spend a great deal of their money and their time in order to make that happen.

If you aspire to great things in audio, Robert’s blog is for you, as is the one you are now on.

SPEAKER PLACEMENT: The ROOM COUPLING METHOD

An excerpt:

[A] few months ago I came across an article on a Room Coupling Method for speaker placement. Encouraged by finding some common ground with author Richard Mak’s thinking, I started trying it out, and it has helped me make some meaningful progress.

One thing I particularly appreciated in Mak’s article was his assertion that “measurements” and “analysis” are not a substitute for “listening.”

“Charts, graphs, room nodes, reflection coefficients, or even a Ph.D. in room acoustics won’t get you there. Many who are armed with an arsenal of scientific knowledge do not even know how or what to listen for on a reference test track.”

To Mak’s point, as I attempted to apply his approach to my speaker and listening chair positions, I realized in the process that even though the placement of my speakers and listening chair have been suboptimal for some time, that time was far from wasted.

Because in that time I’ve done A LOT of listening, and that listening has led to a special kind of knowledge, which for a long time was without a clear application. Mak’s methodology has since given me an outlet for this knowledge, and all that listening is now paying off.

In his article, Mak walks us through a process that begins with how to determine the distance of the speakers from the back wall. From there he describes how to determine their width, then their toe-in angle, and finally how to dial in the position of the listening chair.

For those of you who would like to tune and tweak the location of their speakers, the article seems to have some good advice for doing that, with plenty of tests to challenge both your setup and your critical listening skills. (We have some great test records you might find useful as well. The more difficult ones to get to sound right can be found here.)

This subject is so complicated that to say much more might send me down a rabbit hole I’d have a hard time climbing out of, but here’s a thought or two.

I’ve had many different big speaker systems set up in a number of good-sized rooms over the years, starting in 1975. When I moved into the house I bought in Thousand Oaks in the early 2000s there was a “great room” with a piano on the far end (where the speakers are now) and a dining table at the opposite end. It measured 15×30 with about a nine foot ceiling.

I was hoping to use my Legacy Whisper speakers in this room so that I could audition records all day (my desk can be seen there on the right). I spent about two years trying to make the speakers sound good where you see them in the picture below.

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Money Down the Drain

Basic Audio Advice — These Are the Fundamentals of Good Sound

Readers of this blog know that I’m a fan of big speakers, but in a room that’s as bad for sound reproduction as this one is, these monsters would qualify as a form of torture at anything above a whisper.

There is an ideal balance between absorption and reflection that must be found for every room. The balance this fellow has chosen is 98% reflection, which will lead to 100% awful sound.

I don’t even like the picture between the speakers. If you must have something there, in my experience rarely will it sound good unless it is five or more feet off the ground. (See picture below.)

Note that sidewall absorption in our listening room is never more than about five feet high. For some reason that seems to work the best. We tried lots of different heights over the course of years and we always came back to nothing over five feet.

The back wall has 4 inch thick 4×8 sheets of styrofoam across most of it, leaving the corners empty (which always seems to work the best, again, who knows why).

A small piece of absoptive material in the middle up high seemed to help, but more than that was too much and less did nothing.

These may be the most wonderful speakers in the world in the right room, but in this room there is no speaker that could possibly reproduce music properly, which means this guy spent a lot of money and got nothing for it. He’s not alone.

He could get some carpet and pull his speakers well out into the room for starters, but then the whole thing just won’t have the elegance it did, so what on earth would ever make him do such a thing? His favorite music? Hah, that’s a good one.

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Soundstaging At All Costs – A Flawed Approach to Audio

More on the Subject of Vague Imaging

The first thing I noticed about this system is that the Hallographs are in the wrong place, or at least they are in the wrong place if you are only using one pair. The first pair should be to the outside and just behind the speakers.

What this system screams out to those of us who have heard a lot of stereos, in my case having spent about fifty years in high-end audio, is “Soundstage Freak.”

The speakers are too far apart to create a proper center image.

The sound will be exceptionally spacious this way, but it is also very likely to be washed out and vague.

If you listen exclusively to orchestral music, and you like to sit toward the back of the hall when you go to live performances, then yes, you can almost justify having the speakers this far apart.

For most other music this is not a good approach.

A good vocal recording is all you would need to demonstrate the serious shortcomings of placing your speakers this wide apart.

If this were your setup, But I Might Die Tonight could show you the error of your ways, the way it showed me some of mine (albeit different ones) when I had initially finished the speaker setup at our new studio.

I worked on my speaker placement and room treatments for weeks and months after that, but I knew something was wrong well before that two minute song was over.

Stardust would also be a good choice. Most of Julie London‘s records would work. Some of the more intimate Ella records would be ideal of course, but we rarely have much stock. Blue would work, as would any early Joni Mitchell album.

The recordings of singer songwriters rarely place them anywhere but in the center of the stage, the best of them as prominently as possible. Many of our Hot Stamper pressings would make excellent test discs for getting this aspect of speaker placement dialed in better.

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My Favorite Speaker, Badly Setup

More Speaker Advice

Here is a picture of someone else’s old Focus speakers, likely very much like our own, but of course we have stands that angle the speakers (an angle that took me months to get dialed in right), and he has his speakers sitting directly on the floor with no spikes underneath them at all, which is a very bad idea!

The speakers are way too close to the back wall and somewhat too close to the side walls too.

Lots of other issues but, hey, not my stereo so what difference to me does it make? He clearly has a lot to learn about audio.

Which simply means he has lots of work to do, but if you’ve been in this game as long as I have, we both know he will probably never do it. His system as it is stands is probably musical and enjoyable, and for most folks that is enough.

Robert Brook has been experimenting with different aspects of audio lately. His Broken Record blog has lots to say about these issues. I agree with much of what he has written. The Analog Set Up section on his blog is probably a good place to start to see what he has learned by ignoring conventional wisdom and testing every aspect of audio with an open mind. (more…)