Living Room System

[Funnychap]

My living room system pulls duty for "fill the house with music" and more casual/lazy HT viewing, or if I just want to watch something on the QD-OLED instead. It's just gone through a round of up upgrades in the last few weeks as well.

Current Equipment:

Television: 65" Samsung S95C QD-OLED
Receiver: Anthem MRX 540 8k
Power Amp (fronts): Musical Fidelity A308 Integrated (HT passthrough)
Sources: PC, Apple TV 4k Gen 3, Panasonic BD-85 bluray player
Fronts: Paradigm Studio Reference 100 v2
Surrounds: Kanto Yu Passive
Sub: REL s/510

The room is 25' x 13' and open on both sides of the central section where the system is set up. The floors are hardwood with an area rug and stippled ceiling. It is not treated and has a slightly higher RT60 of 350-500. I have been toying with the idea of something like a large 8' x 6' hanging aborber for the center of the ceiling but it probably wouldn't do all that much on it's own for the price it would likely be (I might try DYI though).

Recent changes:

-The MRX 540 8k replaced an Anthem AVM 50v. I wanted something to do centralized 4k 120Hz switching and the Anthem x40s have pretty good digital front ends. Being 15-20 years newer, I didn't think I'd be giving up anything from the 50v and I didn't feel like spending over double for another AVM 70 8k separate. This also gives me ARC Genesis and network control which is much easier and more convenient to tweak and upload than the old serial based ARC on the AVM 50v.

-The REL s/510 replaced an old Energy 12" EPS-150. The Energy was going on 25 years old or more and would occassionally hum for no apparent reason. I put a little REL T/Zero MkIII in my office/bedroom system using a high level connection and I have been enjoying the results up there with that integration. I decided to give a larger REL a shot in this system since sub 20 Hz bass wasn't really a concern in this room. It's running high-level on the mains and LFE input for the surrounds.

-The surrounds were added because the MRX 540 gave me extra channels of amplification and I had the Kanto's in storage already. I picked them up 60% when the modest local shop closed out in the fall. They roll off a lot more than the mains but I'm not noticing any major tonal mismatch so I'm quite happy with the results - expectially for what was essentially a $100 CAD pair of speakers.

The placement of the sub isn't ideal but I don't really like the other options I have considered. There's a fairly nasty drop-out around 25-27 Hz in the room (at the MLP measurment position at least), but the fronts and the sub working together do a pretty good job of filling each others dips in. ARC tames the peaks where the additives go up a bit high and REW reports decent output down to about 17 - 20 Hz (although I only measured at a 75db reference). I'm pretty happy with the bass sound overall. I'm still trying to tweak the LFE side of things but any issues remaining there aren't really apparent while watching so far.

View attachment 65124

View attachment 65125

Things are tuned for an MLP at the center of the couch, but I almost never actually do critical listening from there. It's more of a lay down and enjoy kind of room for me.

Probably not the usual type of set up among users here, but that's the tour.

There should not be any objects between your L and R speakers (or keep those objects low below the height of your mids/tweeters), otherwise you won't get a phantom center vocalist or 3D imaging.
You should also try different speaker distances 1'-3' away from the front wall.
And use a lossless music source like Apple Music, don't cripple your music quality with compressed Spotify.

 

[dolynick]

There should not be any objects between your L and R speakers (or keep those objects low below the height of your mids/tweeters), otherwise you won't get a phantom center vocalist or 3D imaging.
You should also try different speaker distances 1'-3' away from the front wall.
And use a lossless music source like Apple Music, don't cripple your music quality with compressed Spotify.

This must be a bot or something. Not a thing thing in the post is connected to the reality of the setup or what is shown in the system pics.

 

[Funnychap]

This must be a bot or something. Not a thing thing in the post is connected to the reality of the setup or what is shown in the system pics.

Whatever

 

[isolar8001]

Whatever

Oh God....not another day with you....

 

[Mikado463]

Oh God....not another day with you....

I know what you mean, but I must say, I do agree with 'nothing' in the 'Bermuda Triangle' as I like to call it. The area between you and your L/R speakers.

 

[dolynick]

I know what you mean, but I must say, I do agree with 'nothing' in the 'Bermuda Triangle' as I like to call it. The area between you and your L/R speakers.

Sure, but there is nothing between the midrange and tweeters of the mains. All the equipment is well below that level and down at the woofer level - which is clear to see from the pic.

As for the rest...

The speakers are out 1' from the wall and within his recommended range already. I'm sure there's another placement that might be better but there are practical considerations as this is an actively used living space. I've also been pretty clear that I'm quite happy with the sound I'm getting from the system already. So... Offering a solution without a problem?

And the bit about Apple Music is just headscratching as A) It wouldn't likely be my choice for lossless streaming, B) I don't stream music anyways and C) I never discussed what I'm playing from where so it's just a massive assumption from them in the first place.

But, apparently not a bot. So thanks for reading Funnychap and I hope you enjoyed the pics, etc.

 

[dolynick]

So the amplifier in this setup has been changed since the fall. The old Musical Fidelity A308 was starting to have some issues when pushed hard and has been replaced with a new Musical Fidelity M6x PRX power amplifier (230W into 8 ohms, ~360 into 4 ohms).

I retuned things with ARC and I think it sounds better than ever now. I didn't bother posting new charts though, as I didn't really see a point in getting bogged down over room specific and mic position specific quibbles in a graph. I was able to get a tuning that was still measurement base level down to 15 Hz, but felt that that was pushing things a bit too hard (well beyond spec of the sub or the speakers) so I backed off a little bit.

I'm hoping to get the A308 serviced but it's tough finding an actual shop still in operation around here that will do it. Looks like it will require some travel if I want to pursue it.

 

[3db]

My living room system pulls duty for "fill the house with music" and more casual/lazy HT viewing, or if I just want to watch something on the QD-OLED instead. It's just gone through a round of up upgrades in the last few weeks as well.

Current Equipment:

Television: 65" Samsung S95C QD-OLED
Receiver: Anthem MRX 540 8k
Power Amp (fronts): Musical Fidelity A308 Integrated (HT passthrough)
Sources: PC, Apple TV 4k Gen 3, Panasonic BD-85 bluray player
Fronts: Paradigm Studio Reference 100 v2
Surrounds: Kanto Yu Passive
Sub: REL s/510

The room is 25' x 13' and open on both sides of the central section where the system is set up. The floors are hardwood with an area rug and stippled ceiling. It is not treated and has a slightly higher RT60 of 350-500. I have been toying with the idea of something like a large 8' x 6' hanging aborber for the center of the ceiling but it probably wouldn't do all that much on it's own for the price it would likely be (I might try DYI though).

Recent changes:

-The MRX 540 8k replaced an Anthem AVM 50v. I wanted something to do centralized 4k 120Hz switching and the Anthem x40s have pretty good digital front ends. Being 15-20 years newer, I didn't think I'd be giving up anything from the 50v and I didn't feel like spending over double for another AVM 70 8k separate. This also gives me ARC Genesis and network control which is much easier and more convenient to tweak and upload than the old serial based ARC on the AVM 50v.

-The REL s/510 replaced an old Energy 12" EPS-150. The Energy was going on 25 years old or more and would occassionally hum for no apparent reason. I put a little REL T/Zero MkIII in my office/bedroom system using a high level connection and I have been enjoying the results up there with that integration. I decided to give a larger REL a shot in this system since sub 20 Hz bass wasn't really a concern in this room. It's running high-level on the mains and LFE input for the surrounds.

-The surrounds were added because the MRX 540 gave me extra channels of amplification and I had the Kanto's in storage already. I picked them up 60% when the modest local shop closed out in the fall. They roll off a lot more than the mains but I'm not noticing any major tonal mismatch so I'm quite happy with the results - expectially for what was essentially a $100 CAD pair of speakers.

The placement of the sub isn't ideal but I don't really like the other options I have considered. There's a fairly nasty drop-out around 25-27 Hz in the room (at the MLP measurment position at least), but the fronts and the sub working together do a pretty good job of filling each others dips in. ARC tames the peaks where the additives go up a bit high and REW reports decent output down to about 17 - 20 Hz (although I only measured at a 75db reference). I'm pretty happy with the bass sound overall. I'm still trying to tweak the LFE side of things but any issues remaining there aren't really apparent while watching so far.

View attachment 65124

View attachment 65125

Things are tuned for an MLP at the center of the couch, but I almost never actually do critical listening from there. It's more of a lay down and enjoy kind of room for me.

Probably not the usual type of set up among users here, but that's the tour.

Nice room and setup. Looks very cozy and inviting.

 

[dolynick]

Nice room and setup. Looks very cozy and inviting.

Thanks. Actually gets a lot more use than the far more elaborate theatre room downstairs.

 

[3db]

Thanks. Actually gets a lot more use than the far more elaborate theatre room downstairs.

It depends on the season for me. During late spring, summer, and early fall, I tend to use my main floor more for a couple reasons. I want to enjoy the extended daylight hours that are taken from me outside those periods. The AC runs in the summer and it gets cold AF down there and makes it almost impossible to enjoy the space.

 

[Funnychap]

Thanks. Actually gets a lot more use than the far more elaborate theatre room downstairs.

Yep same here. The family members use the 2ndary home theater in the family room with a 75 in TV, but no one uses the primary home theater with the150in screen except me so that's why I'm not going to upgrade to a 4k projector but instead get the Apple Vision Pro goggles (the eye tracking instead of a mouse cursor is amazing, as well as several 300 in virtual screens).

 

[dolynick]

For me it's mostly that I'm feeling lazy and want to flake out, laying down to watch. Downstairs is all upright seating in chairs. I know... First world problems

 

[dolynick]

After long consideration and going back and forth over replacing the Paradigm Reference Studio 100 v2s in my living room system, I picked up a pair of new Paradigm Founder 100Fs.

Adventures in Setup and Tuning

I set them up and let them just play for an hour or two. I don't buy into the heavy break-in requirements manufacturer's recommend, but a little time for things to loosen up after coming out of the box is easy enough to do and seems reasonable. I then took a measurement at a central listening position with all room EQ and subs disabled. This is the Founder 100Fs in my room au-naturel:

The reference level was 75db and hitting 35Hz at that in my room, about 26Hz at -6db from reference and just under 22Hz at -10db from reference. Paradigm specs them at 25Hz DIN (which I would assume means -10) so things are generally on target.

I ended up going through several phases of tuning before settling where I did. I won't go into all the speicfics of earlier results other than to say that (as you'll see in measurements to follow), I ended up with a hole in the bass in the low 20s with these. This isn't entirely surprising as the REL s/510 is rated at -6db @21Hz but I never saw it with the old studios as they seemed to love this room and covered that up in the pairing previously. Still, I wasn't really hearing a huge issue with music as the majority of that is 25Hz or higher anyways. I did find myself limited to one phase setting at first (the same as I used with the Studio 100s), as I noted a hum in the room when flipping to the 180 degree setting.

I happened watch Erin's review of the new Mofi V10s and during it he mentioned how sub integration and phase setup is tricky. I started thinking about if the bass was actually a bit muddy currently or not. I had noted that the bass seems slightly odd or out of balance when not in the room (which wasn't the case with the Studios) so I decided I would revisit the phase issue. I recently had some great results eliminating some hum in my theatre room with some new Blue Jeans cables to I decided to try some different cabling options. I ordered a relatively cheap offbrand set of RCA to XLR cables (a nicer pair had a much delayed shipping date) and a pair of Blue Jeans LC-2 RCA interconnects to try in stead of the old Kimber Hero interconnects I had been using. Neither fully eliminated the hum, but both of them did successfully remove the portion that was down low enough that it was reaching the sub and causing the deep hum that was unaccepable. I will revisit the rest of the hum (it's fairly innocuous) at a later date when some other changes in there happen in a month or two.

These were the results of the REL running in it's high level configuration with the mains (Red is the 100F baseline without):

0 Phase:

And 180:

The 180 degree one did seem to be the more complimentary setting.

 

[dolynick]

(New post as there's an image limit for a single one)

I re-ran ARC with the new phase setting.

This time around I decided that I was not going to correct over 500Hz as a) I don't feel these needed it anyways and b) I want to avoid fighting the speakers natural voicing and trying to force it into outputs it's nto naturally comfortable with. As part of that, I wanted to target curves that resulted in mostly cuts to output rather than trying do a lot of boosting to overcome room issues. This is partly why the raw bass levels with the sub tied in are overly boosted - I wanted to give myself headroom to cut down from as that will work better and also reduced the demand on mains woofer while the sub carries them more in tandem.

I chose these settings for my room gain/deep bass bump:

In their 2.0 configuration, I chose a 28Hz 6th order roll off point:

The goal here bing to try to avoid pushing the drivers to fill that gap but let steep roll off stop the correction curve from affecting the deeper bass that comes back after the dip. While these settings weren't perfect for the latter, these are the resultant correction curves:

Left:

Right:

I couldn't quite avoid all upward boosts, but for the most part I was successful. I would have rather not pushed the woofers on the R channel down low as I ended up having to, but it did seem the most benign way to achieve my desired measured results with that raw curve.

This is the result measure at the central listening position with it all in place (blue with EQ, red the original 100Fs alone):

I still get a bit of a dip in the low 20s, but there's still plenty of useable low bass. It also helped with that room effect down around 80-90Hz. Using the original phase setting did not, so I'm glad I revisited it.

The bass is quite notably tighter and more defined with the phase change as well. While I didn't find it to be standing out much at the 0 phase setting, it is now basically impossible to isolate the sub from the mains with the corrected 180 degree setup.

 

[dolynick]

Movie Setup

While the above setup works well for music, that dip in the low 20s was not really what I wanted for movie content. I do end up watching a lot of stuff in the living room nowadays just for the comfort factor.

To address that, I pulled out my 2 SVS SB-1000s from my theatre system (and reconfigured it without, but that's another post in another thread for another time) and moved them up to the living room.

The MRX 540 8k only has a single sub out and I wanted to try the SVS pair on the other side of the room (where I had room for them anyways). To that end, I ordred an SVS Soundpath wireless system to get the sub signal across the room. I also ordered a second receiver, which allowed me to split the output into two without signal loss which normally happens with a Y splitter.

As they would both be fed from the single output, and thus only have roon correction as a single sub, I opted to keep them together. They went to back side of the room, roughly kitty-corner from the REL with the mains.

As these aren't rated to go terribly low either (they're not the new Pro version etiher), I set the level at a relatively high 2/3rds and made sure to give myself lots of headroom to work with in room correction.

These are my room gain/bass targets for the 4.1/2.1 setup:

The mains still have the REL integrated but are set to cross over at 40 Hz. I would have preferred to target a bit lower with them but that's the lower limit with ARC ( ). Still, it will effectively remove excess demand from the mains at the lower frequency which is the goal.

With the relatively high level the subs were set at, it did give me plenty of headroom to work with for curve targeting:

This is the correction curve for the subs:

All reductions so the room EQ is effectively easing their output from the elevated setting for most of the range except for the very lowest range where they actually do need to run harder to reach it effectively. I'm quite happy with how this worked out.

With all that in place, this is the measurements at the central listening position with the 4.1/2.1 profile (light blue 2.1, red is the original 100Fs alone:

Aside from that dip around 50Hz (cross over or perhaps phase issue with the mains/REL on the other side), I am getting a more satisfactory deep base curve for movies. I don't know why there are differences upwards in the frequency response as the correction still doesn't go above 500Hz so they shoudl be the same. Possibly a slight shift in the mic, but I was being prety careful about that. At any rate, I'm not going to fret over it.

Curiously though, I seem to be getting notably stronger deep bass below 19Hz with the REL's single active 10" (and passive 12") than from the pair of active SVS 12"s. (2.0 in dark blue, 2.1 in light blue)

Still, I'm satisfied with the 4.1/2.1 configuration for movies.

There will be some changes and some clutter going out of the room in the next few months so I will probably end up moving these subs a bit and redoing the calibration. When I do that, I will try reversing the phase and see if I get a better result or get rid of that 50Hz dip. I didn't think to try it during intial setup as it wasn't apparent on any baseline measurements. Easy enough to try if I'm having to re-run ARC anyways.

 

[dolynick]

How does it sound?

So, after all of that technical/setup babble, how do the new 100Fs and system actually sound?

Yes, this is where I'll dive into subjective impressions. You got all the measurements. Now I'll try to describe what I hear from the various configs in actual use.

To start off, this is the comparison of the new 2.0 and 2.1 measurements vs the last measurement I took of the Studio 100s w/Rel integrated (bold orange is the Studio 100s):

It's not quite apples to apples as the mic placement was a little different for that measurement but still, you can see that the old Studios were doing well down low.

I bring this up because there is a difference in bass. I'm working from memory of course, the the old system did have more powerful, tactile bass.

Still, the 100Fs are noticably clearer. The Studios 100s just can't match the perceived sharpness or clarity of the new 100Fs. The 100Fs also seem to be noticeably better at being able to delieate and "layer" sounds within the soundstage. This seems most apparent when listening to classical music but it's there for all music if you listen for it. If you need a more practicaly example of that I think the easiest way to describe it is with the Studio 100s the sound/tone was there but instruments were "lumped" together at points in the soundstage whereas with the 100Fs, they sound more distint from each other and like multiple instruments in proximity within the soundstage rather than one conglomeration.

I also think that the 100Fs have a more detailed and refined top end. The Studios old aluminum tweeter rarely got excessively harsh, but the Founders just present better and sweeter. You could say they are "brighter" than the Studios and the measurements do suggest that, but I wouldn't consider the Founders to be exceptionally bright on their own either. They roll off quite as much, so those that like that harmon curve dropping down more at the top end might be why think they're a bit too lively up top.

Back to the topic of bass though, there's a notable difference in the sound of the bass between the 2.0 and 2.1 setups. The 2.0 setup with the REL sounds far more satifying for music than the 2.1 setup with the SVS pair. The bass is just notably more tactile and viseral from the REL. With the SVS pair, the tone is there but it feels much more diffuse and just "there in the room", whereas the REL blends far better and just sounds far more articulate and textured. Part of this might be due to the REL facing the listening position as opposed the the SVS pair sitting to the side of the listening position but there's little contest as to which configuration I prefer for music playback. That being said, the SVS pair does a pretty good job with movies in the full surround configuration where the content lends itself far more to that sort of room filling rumble. So not really a complaint about the SVS pair as their doing their intended job but an observation about how differently the two configurations go about things.

At any rate, at this point I'm fairly happy with the new mains. I had the Studio 100s off to the side in the room for quite a while just incase (although partly because I wasn't sure what to do with them anyways). They got boxed up and moved down into storage now. It saddens me to store them as they were my first "higher end" set of speakers and I am attached to them. Sentimental drivel maybe but there it is. They are 25 years old now though, so it was probably time for something new.

Also, I have to say that the 100Fs are extremely pleasing visually. I'm not sure I've really seen another speaker in person that looks better. I know that looks are a very subjective thing and not all witll agree but it is always a plus when your speakers make you stop and admire them just for the looks. That's definitely the case with these.