Hi!
First post here, but I've been reading voraciously for the past few days. I haven't really come across anything that is directly related, so thought I would run The Plan by the Audioholics and see if I'm on the right track. Hope that this is at least sort of an interesting project (not another boring, multi $XX,000 home theater
)
I own a small clothing shop and have decided that a decent sounding system is a good project during this quiet time of the year. Business is slow, which gives me lots of time to futz around on forums reading about speakers and receivers and such, but not a lot of cash to spend on them.
I'm hoping to keep things under $1000 CDN, but there's some flexability.
The shop is about 40' x 18' with 9.5' ceilings (ceiling tiles). The floor is laminate and we have lots of clothes on racks along the walls and in the middle of the shop, so lots of sound absorbing. We mostly sell t-shirts and stuff, and while we don't want pounding music, sometimes having it a bit loud is OK and desired. Currently, we have a Yamaha RX V350 that plays MP3s off iTunes running on a desktop computer. Quality of the MP3s is 128+, and is hip-hop, funk, breakbeat stuff, and a few odd tracks of rawk and roll and other stuff.
Until a couple of days ago, I had a pair of Celestion Ditton bookshelves set up at the back of the store at almost ceiling height. The speakers are 20 years old and have been abused a bit, but sound pretty good. Speaker placement wasn't ideal (one speaker was in a corner and quite boomy) and in order for the music to be loud enough at the front (where I spend most of the day) it was too loud in the back.
The Plan is to set up 6 speakers in the shop: 2 in the back, 2 in the middle, and 2 up front; the thinking is that this will even out the levels and allow everyone to enjoy while still being able to communicate. To this end, I have purchased (but not yet received) an Onkyo TX-SR503 (7.1 vs the Yamaha's 5.1) and recently bought a pair of Klipsch SB-2s and a pair of Klipsch SS-5 surrounds. The Plan was to have the SB-2s at the front of the store (ceiling height, angled down), the SS-5s in the middle, and ? in the back (maybe keep the Celestions?). Originally, The Plan didn't originally include a sub, but now I'm thinking it'd probably make things more enjoyable. As I understand it, the Onkyo has a "multi-channel stereo" (oxymoron?) mode whereby it will split the left and right signals between the speakers, which would seem ideal for our application.
The one snag that I've hit thus far is with the SB-2s: I've plugged them into the Yamaha receiver for the time being (and tweaked the placement a bit to avoid the corner boominess), and I'm finding that my ears are really "tired" at the end of the day. I posted over in the Loudspeaker forum about this.
Thanks for getting this far! Now a couple of questions:
1) What about a sub? As I've said, I can't really get this place bumping like a club, but it would be nice to have a bit more bass. My concern is that it would end up being too localized, ie. really loud near the sub and not loud enough at the other end of the shop; I don't want to drop the $$ only to find out that it isn't going to work. If you think it would work well, any sugestions? It probably needs to be biggish, huh? (40' x 18' room)
2) I rather not mess with the iTunes EQ too much in an attempt minimize the "tiring" frequencies, so anything I can do to "mellow" the Klipsch speakers a bit?
3) We're now at $632 (Re-furb Onkyo: $212 + SB-2s: $250 + SS-5s: $170) - any ideas on how to spend the remaining cash?
Thanks for any tips, and look forward to comments!
