Newb needs some help: speaker size

[Bucknekked]

Some acoustic panels on the walls and a pair of good near field monitors (LS50) would turn that room into WOW.

Kenm
I am interested in acoustic panels, but quite frankly I don't know how to tell "how much" and "where" they need to be. I am going back to ground zero and doing a room EQ measurement. Several members have suggested measurements of the room before making any changes. I find that logic hard to argue with so I have ordered a new measurement microphone and will set up REW and do some measurements. If using REW provides the measurements, how does one begin to predict how much room treatments will help?

 

[lovinthehd]

Maybe check out http://realtraps.com/ or http://www.gikacoustics.com/

 

[shadyJ]

Room treatments is a big subject. If that is something you are interested in, you would do well to look into some tutorials on the subject, especially in conjunction with REW. Do some googling on REW and room treatments, you will find a lot quickly. However, you could also just get speakers that have a well-controlled dispersion thereby doing away with the need for treatments. Here is an article by Audioholics which addresses the subject for small rooms. Here is another article. The gist is room treatments may not be as beneficial as you think.

 

[Pogre]

My Denon does have Audessy (sp?) although I was never impressed with how it turned out. I always did manual overrides after using it. Its a 2009 vintage Denon I think. Believe it or not, I have SAD (stereo acquisition disease) after just a few days on this forum. It would appear I want to replace my AVR now as well. I can make up some reasons if that makes anyone feel better. Just because is what I have right now

lol. I've been struck by the same disease! don't worry, it's not fatal. just expensive...

I came on here wanting to throw all kinds of money at a receiver or amp and was instead talked into upgrading my subs and speakers. I now own the best audio setup I've ever had. these guys are pretty good at stopping folks from driving off a cliff and there really is a ton of knowledge and good advice here.

I dunno if I would consider 2009 "vintage", so much as a little outdated. if your primary goal is music, I would think your receiver would work just fine in that small room. unless like you suggested, you want some more features. in that case, some homework. a lot of the more high dollar avr's offer a ton of features I suspect you would never use.

 

[MrBoat]

I can vouch for the epidemic of "SAD," with regard to this place. Then you get to acquire quality source material. What are you using for source material? Like you, I listen to 2 channel music near field style as well.

I have my pc hooked up to the Denon and I manually EQ it from there to suit my moods on any given day. I know this is impractical in modern times, but is how I enjoy it. Most days I find the sweet spot with my personal preferences.

Before deciding on speakers, I had a friend bring a pair of his klipsch towers over, and some bookshelf speakers. They weren't for me or, left me somewhat undecided. I also had a large pair of JBL 3 way speakers that I own as a benchmark, which I likely will not part with because they were pretty good in their own right too. At least better than his Klipsch towers. He even had to agree that although what I had was not supposed to work in my space according to modern habits, they sounded surprisingly good.

You said you have been a audio head for a long time. What did you use to like? That's essentially where I started and narrowed it down to the best of all the worlds with regard to my preferences. What kind of music do you listen to primarily? Do you find that you like similar amounts of bass, mid range and treble across genres?

 

[Bucknekked]

What room analyzer did you try to use before?

ShadyJ
I have re-installed REW and took delivery on the UMIK usb measurement microphone you recommended. That's a nice product . Makes setting up REW a snap. I run my listening system from a Mac Mini connected to my Denon AVR. That makes setting up REW easy as well because I can run REW from the same system that all the hardware is installed on. I don't have to plug and unplug stuff and guess if I have it right.

Once I got through the setup and shake down to make sure I am taking valid measurements, the first tough question comes up. How do I evaluate the data? I can run the sweep tests and get output graphs, but I don't have the experience to tell if what I see is great, average, or pure crap. I have not tried the waterfall graphs yet, but I think I could get there. My problem with doing that is the same as the sweeps: I do not know how to evaluate the data.

I have spent a little time on the REW website, but one of the first recommendations is to save your data and have somebody that knows what they are looking at do the evaluation. I am able to take advice so that's what I would like to do. Is there someone on the forum who would be willing to look at data and make sense of it?

I can save and send whatever an expert knows is the right thing to send. I may need advice on that as well.

 

[shadyJ]

ShadyJ
I have re-installed REW and took delivery on the UMIK usb measurement microphone you recommended. That's a nice product . Makes setting up REW a snap. I run my listening system from a Mac Mini connected to my Denon AVR. That makes setting up REW easy as well because I can run REW from the same system that all the hardware is installed on. I don't have to plug and unplug stuff and guess if I have it right.

Once I got through the setup and shake down to make sure I am taking valid measurements, the first tough question comes up. How do I evaluate the data? I can run the sweep tests and get output graphs, but I don't have the experience to tell if what I see is great, average, or pure crap. I have not tried the waterfall graphs yet, but I think I could get there. My problem with doing that is the same as the sweeps: I do not know how to evaluate the data.

I have spent a little time on the REW website, but one of the first recommendations is to save your data and have somebody that knows what they are looking at do the evaluation. I am able to take advice so that's what I would like to do. Is there someone on the forum who would be willing to look at data and make sense of it?

I can save and send whatever an expert knows is the right thing to send. I may need advice on that as well.

Hi Buck, have you taken the sweeps yet? Do individual sweeps of 20 Hz to 20 kHz from both the right and left channels with the microphone at the position your head is normally at when you listen to music.

After you have the measurements, click on the 'Graph' button on the top left, and on the menu that it brings up, select 'Apply 1/12 smoothing' for each measurement. One thing you can also do is then select the 'All SPL' button from the center menu right above the graphs. This should overlay the measurements. With the right and left channel measurements presented there, click on the 'Average the Responses' button on the lower left hand corner of the graph. As it says, it will give you an average of the two responses.

After you get the left channel smoothed measurement, right channel smoothed measurement, and the average response of two, all on the 'All SPL' page, click on that camera icon that hovers over the top left corner and is labeled 'Capture'. This will take a picture of that graph. Post that picture here, and we might be able to help you evaluate the data. Make sure the curves on the graph are labeled 'Left', 'Right', and 'Averaged' by changing the names of the curves (the names will be the date and time at the top of the curve tabs on the left side).

If you have any problems, let us know here and we will try to help you.

 

[Bucknekked]

Hi Buck, have you taken the sweeps yet? Do individual sweeps of 20 Hz to 20 kHz from both the right and left channels with the microphone at the position your head is normally at when you listen to music.

After you have the measurements, click on the 'Graph' button on the top left, and on the menu that it brings up, select 'Apply 1/12 smoothing' for each measurement. One thing you can also do is then select the 'All SPL' button from the center menu right above the graphs. This should overlay the measurements. With the right and left channel measurements presented there, click on the 'Average the Responses' button on the lower left hand corner of the graph. As it says, it will give you an average of the two responses.

After you get the left channel smoothed measurement, right channel smoothed measurement, and the average response of two, all on the 'All SPL' page, click on that camera icon that hovers over the top left corner and is labeled 'Capture'. This will take a picture of that graph. Post that picture here, and we might be able to help you evaluate the data. Make sure the curves on the graph are labeled 'Left', 'Right', and 'Averaged' by changing the names of the curves (the names will be the date and time at the top of the curve tabs on the left side).

If you have any problems, let us know here and we will try to help you.

ShadyJ
Thank you for the excellent directions on how to simplify the recording of the sweep data and capture it for someone to look at. I have included the graph here of LEFT CHANNEL=RED, RIGHT CHANNEL=GREEN, COMBINED CHANNELS=BLUE. A couple of things stick out to me, but lets see what you think of the data. I have the data file as well but since you didn't ask for it I didn't include it here. I took all the smoothing and averaging steps you recommended.

 

[shadyJ]

If you want to provide a link to the data, I can look at it for you. As for the measurements, the window is so large that we wouldn't be able to make much sense out of what is happening. I should have mentioned this before, now that I think about it.

To fix this click on the 'Limits' button which is in the upper right hand corner above the graph. It will bring up a window called "Set Axis Graph Limits". Put these figures in the dialogue boxes in that window: Set 'Left' to 20, set 'Right' to 20,000, set 'Top' to 100, and set 'Bottom' to 40.

Do the same thing you just did, but with those new Limits settings, and we can start talking about what is going on with the sound in your room.

 

[Bucknekked]

If you want to provide a link to the data, I can look at it for you. As for the measurements, the window is so large that we wouldn't be able to make much sense out of what is happening. I should have mentioned this before, now that I think about it.

To fix this click on the 'Limits' button which is in the upper right hand corner above the graph. It will bring up a window called "Set Axis Graph Limits". Put these figures in the dialogue boxes in that window: Set 'Left' to 20, set 'Right' to 20,000, set 'Top' to 100, and set 'Bottom' to 40.

Do the same thing you just did, but with those new Limits settings, and we can start talking about what is going on with the sound in your room.

ShadyJ
I took the corrective actions you suggested and the graph begins to tell a much clearer story for sure.
I have it attached. The data file is pretty porky so I can't attach it here. I will have to see if I can get it up on Box or Google docs or some place I can point a URL to. But, here is the corrected graph and it has some interesting things to say. Thank you for being willing to take a look and see what I can learn.

 

[Bucknekked]

ShadyJ
I took the corrective actions you suggested and the graph begins to tell a much clearer story for sure.
I have it attached. The data file is pretty porky so I can't attach it here. I will have to see if I can get it up on Box or Google docs or some place I can point a URL to. But, here is the corrected graph and it has some interesting things to say. Thank you for being willing to take a look and see what I can learn.

View attachment 19702

I am thinking about sharing the .mdat file on Google docs. I believe I can share it by simply posting this link. It is supposed to be shareable to anyone that can see the link. Lets see if that works.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8HNFoC4d-ZyV09EVEZ0QkpZOUFYaVVXQzJ6cUtEc01XbHNN

 

[shadyJ]

That response isn't bad for an in-room response. The ragged low end is expected, and you would benefit from some EQing there. The dip at 90 Hz may mean the subwoofer is not fully in phase with the speakers. I would guess that the dip at 1.6 kHz would be due to the angle you are listening to the speakers at, and is probably due to some slight cancellation effect of the woofer and tweeter overlapping each other, since the crossover is at the same area (1,500 Hz). This can also be seen on this graph, where the purple trace is the RB-62 IIs. Some of the character of that measurement can be seen in your measurement.

Anyway, I do think you could benefit from a more neutral speaker. A speaker with a flat response could shore up the dips at 500 Hz and 1500 Hz, and these are pretty crucial frequency ranges. I think you should get something to trim that peak at 70 Hz. If you do that, you will have a very good subwoofer response for a single sub in a small room. It doesn't dig deep, but upper 30's Hz response should cover almost all conventional music recordings. I wouldn't bother adding another sub, as long as you get the speaker in synch with the sub to shore up that dip at 90 Hz.

It will not take $3k to fix these problems, although that is a nice healthy budget.

 

[shadyJ]

I looked at the Mdat file. It is telling the same story as your graph. Thanks for sharing. When I advise people to measure their setup, they mostly just brush that suggestion off, but it can't be known for sure what is happening and areas for improvement until these measurements are made. You have done this, and you know how you can benefit, so it's nice to see someone who is seriously looking to improve their sound instead of just looking for an excuse to buy a shinier speaker. I tip my hat to you, sir!

 

[Bucknekked]

That response isn't bad for an in-room response. The ragged low end is expected, and you would benefit from some EQing there. The dip at 90 Hz may mean the subwoofer is not fully in phase with the speakers. I would guess that the dip at 1.6 kHz would be due to the angle you are listening to the speakers at, and is probably due to some slight cancellation effect of the woofer and tweeter overlapping each other, since the crossover is at the same area (1,500 Hz). This can also be seen on this graph, where the purple trace is the RB-62 IIs. Some of the character of that measurement can be seen in your measurement.

Anyway, I do think you could benefit from a more neutral speaker. A speaker with a flat response could shore up the dips at 500 Hz and 1500 Hz, and these are pretty crucial frequency ranges. I think you should get something to trim that peak at 70 Hz. If you do that, you will have a very good subwoofer response for a single sub in a small room. It doesn't dig deep, but upper 30's Hz response should cover almost all conventional music recordings. I wouldn't bother adding another sub, as long as you get the speaker in synch with the sub to shore up that dip at 90 Hz.

It will not take $3k to fix these problems, although that is a nice healthy budget.

ShadyJ
Thanks so much for taking some of your time to look at the data and give me some pointers on what my room is doing. When I first started this thread, I was just interested in speaker size for a purchase: stick with bookshelves or could my room handle a floor standing speaker. Now, I am intrigued by the challenge of what I may be able to accomplish by taking actions with the existing setup.

Woofer/speaker mesh point was the one thing I could see in the graph that looked pretty rough. My Klipsch subwoofer has phase adjustments, loudness adjustments, and I believe the crossover point is adjustable. Is there a pattern to follow for those adjustments, or is it just easter egging them? I can tell you anecdotally that there is a discernable peak in bass response with some music. Many choices are not affected at all, but there are some that its noticably too much. I can graphically see why that might be the case. Now, I would like to see if I could fix it. Its now a challenge!

At the other end of the spectrum, I find it interesting there is a drop out at 1500hz. I have always considered the Klipsch speakers to be too bright. And the way I have the Audessy adjusted, I have the high end tuned down as much as it will let me. And the speakers are still able to tire me out and are a little too much at the high end with some material. I would probably not find more punch in higher range enjoyable.

Another anecdote: I visited a high end music shop in Scottsdale Arizona a few months ago. Their view of cheap speakers was $10,000. They had 2 setups over $500,000 onsite (the whole system, not just the speakers). What made the visit interesting (besides the incredibly over the top prices) was their take on measuring and understanding your room. The advisor there told me not to waste my money on buying speakers until I understood my rooms affect on the total system. In fact, he would only sell most of their products by including on site service hours to do a complete workup of the room. He said spending serious dollars on speakers is largely a crapshoot if you don't measure and understand where they will live and perform.

This exercise is giving me a little intro and some insight. Now I'd like to know how to do EQ. I honestly don't have a clue how to EQ a system. I should know. But I don't. I have seen references to generating EQ files from REW and then applying them to your system. Again, I have no idea how to do that. Insight?

I have enjoyed the process in this thread. I would like to learn the next steps

 

[KenM10759]

I would also like to know something about it (room correction) that is fuzzy to me. My receiver has a low-level Audyssey system and I have used it a number of times. It doesn't give me cool graphs, just shows via On Screen Display that it has applied measurements to output. I've also used Anthem's ARC with an MRX710 receiver and it's interface between the receiver and a PC, and how you save the correction file to the receiver. I get how it works on both systems.

Here's where I'm in the dark: When you use an "aftermarket" measurement system such as REW and come up with what needs to be corrected or equalized, what is the procedure, software files and hardware used to actually get from measurements to corrected sound when it's not a "canned system" like Audyssey or ARC?

 

[shadyJ]

ShadyJ
Thanks so much for taking some of your time to look at the data and give me some pointers on what my room is doing. When I first started this thread, I was just interested in speaker size for a purchase: stick with bookshelves or could my room handle a floor standing speaker. Now, I am intrigued by the challenge of what I may be able to accomplish by taking actions with the existing setup.

Woofer/speaker mesh point was the one thing I could see in the graph that looked pretty rough. My Klipsch subwoofer has phase adjustments, loudness adjustments, and I believe the crossover point is adjustable. Is there a pattern to follow for those adjustments, or is it just easter egging them? I can tell you anecdotally that there is a discernable peak in bass response with some music. Many choices are not affected at all, but there are some that its noticably too much. I can graphically see why that might be the case. Now, I would like to see if I could fix it. Its now a challenge!

At the other end of the spectrum, I find it interesting there is a drop out at 1500hz. I have always considered the Klipsch speakers to be too bright. And the way I have the Audessy adjusted, I have the high end tuned down as much as it will let me. And the speakers are still able to tire me out and are a little too much at the high end with some material. I would probably not find more punch in higher range enjoyable.

Another anecdote: I visited a high end music shop in Scottsdale Arizona a few months ago. Their view of cheap speakers was $10,000. They had 2 setups over $500,000 onsite (the whole system, not just the speakers). What made the visit interesting (besides the incredibly over the top prices) was their take on measuring and understanding your room. The advisor there told me not to waste my money on buying speakers until I understood my rooms affect on the total system. In fact, he would only sell most of their products by including on site service hours to do a complete workup of the room. He said spending serious dollars on speakers is largely a crapshoot if you don't measure and understand where they will live and perform.

This exercise is giving me a little intro and some insight. Now I'd like to know how to do EQ. I honestly don't have a clue how to EQ a system. I should know. But I don't. I have seen references to generating EQ files from REW and then applying them to your system. Again, I have no idea how to do that. Insight?

I have enjoyed the process in this thread. I would like to learn the next steps

The next step is to set the sub in phase with the speakers. Your sub has a continuously adjustable phase. Assuming it is set to zero right now, set it at 180 degrees and measure the response. If there is still a dip at the crossover frequency between the sub and speakers, try different phase settings until that dip is gone.

After that, you should get an EQ system for the bass. This is one of the few things automated room correction is good for. You can get something like Audyssey, or something manual like miniDSP. MiniDSP is the most surefire route to getting a good response, but, of course, it takes more effort. Here is an application sheet on how to use miniDSP is EQ your bass. I haven't used minDSP myself, but there are lots of good tutorials out there, and it looks easy enough.

It also sounds like you will need better speakers. I would encourage you to get speakers that have a flat response and uniform dispersion. I would get bookshelf speakers. Some brands to look at which can fit these qualities: Revel, Philharmonic, Salk, JBL Pro (especially the LSR 7 series), Genelec, KEF. Some other speakers that look interesting: Emotiva Stealth 8s and Hsu CCB-8s.

 

[Bucknekked]

Interesting process. Part of me wasn't as dumb as I thought when I set the system up apparently. I can make the bass bump and dip worse with adjustments, but I can make it no better. That tells me the settings I ended up with were the optimal ones (although certainly not perfect). By adjusting phase, crossover frequency, loudness and positioning, I can make the bumps/humps worse than my initial measurement settings, but I can not close either problem area. I can live with that because my initial reason for getting in to this discussion was to use the information learned to help me buy a better set of speakers. Short of buying a MiniDSP, I can't really do much more to affect the sound with what I have installed.

Its not clear to me that the MiniDSP would be able to mask the bass problem because its the subwoofer itself that's producing that waveform not the receiver. It may be able to, but I may take the cost of the MiniDSP and apply it to the new speakers. Perhaps even do away with the subwoofer entirely.

ShadyJ : you have been an immense help on this thread and on this topic. I hope you can see that I appreciate all your help and I have a greater appreciation for what I can accomplish with measurements. I also have a new measurement microphone that's pretty stinking cool and I can actually use REW at the first grade level now.

 

[shadyJ]

It's not the subwoofer that is causing the problem in bass- it is far more likely the room. It is frequency where the wavelength is overlapping itself in that small room thereby causing a summation and cancellation. I wouldn't be so quick to toss the sub. All you need to do is bring down that peak. Any parametric equalizer will be up to the task. Audyssey would probably do the job just fine, to be honest. As for the dip, or cancellation, the only way to deal with that is either to move the sub to another position (which will more than likely just shift the frequency the problem is occurring at), move the listening position, or get another subwoofer that fills in that null. Adding another sub is the best solution, in addition to EQing down the peaks.

Another thing you might try to iron out the bass response is to lower the crossover point of speakers to the subwoofer. Try a 60 Hz crossover and see how that affects the response.

 

[jcriggs]

While all answers to ur question are very good and no dought have their merits ultimately it's up to u. If I'm understanding this question its not the speaker size u are asking about but more the box size. Ultimately the only person who can best answer this question is u itself. Like me personally, I would have the speakers tucked back in the corner but that's me personally.

 

[Bucknekked]

It's not the subwoofer that is causing the problem in bass- it is far more likely the room. It is frequency where the wavelength is overlapping itself in that small room thereby causing a summation and cancellation. I wouldn't be so quick to toss the sub. All you need to do is bring down that peak. Any parametric equalizer will be up to the task. Audyssey would probably do the job just fine, to be honest. As for the dip, or cancellation, the only way to deal with that is either to move the sub to another position (which will more than likely just shift the frequency the problem is occurring at), move the listening position, or get another subwoofer that fills in that null. Adding another sub is the best solution, in addition to EQing down the peaks.

Another thing you might try to iron out the bass response is to lower the crossover point of speakers to the subwoofer. Try a 60 Hz crossover and see how that affects the response.

ShadyJ:
That makes sense to me. I was wondering at what point in this conversation the actual room and the problem of standing waves would come up. It was my chief fear about the room when I read about room size as a major factor in the sound of a system. So far, I haven't seen major issues. If this is the first and most troublesome issue (the bass hump/bump) I will face with this room, I'm a happy man because although it looks ugly on the graph, there are solutions. Additionally, the system sounds pretty good to me.

I may yet try the miniDSP and an EQ effort to see if I can remediate the response and get it flatter across the spectrum. I tried moving the sub when I set it up. There were lots of worse locations for how it sounded, but none better than where it is. Its located on the left wall , about a foot front the front corner.

Your suggestion of a second sub and EQing down the peaks is solid advice. I have a second Klipsch sub that matches the one I am using. Unfortunately, the bash amp in it is ailing. The estimated cost of fixing it is halfway to the cost of a new SVS sub. I think I would opt for the SVS sub instead of fixing the Klipsch.

I did play with the crossover frequency on the sub. No visible result on the graph. I did not play with the crossover frequency inside the receiver. I guess I could try that. If its the room, it will stay the same but it is a variable I did not try just yet. Thanks again for the insights and thoughts. very, very informative and helpful