[Brian Cheney]

I will relate some bizzare "real world" findings from recent travel:

1. No bass, nor any drop to drink:
This has come up twice recently.  Owners with pre/pros complaining of no bottom end from RM 2's and RM 40's inspite of the processor being set to "full range".  In both cases the speakers were getting nothing below 80Hz.  Bypassing processors told the tale.

2. What's that sound?
A strange coloration, like fuzz or distortion, absolutely baffled me.  Turned out to be rattling blinds covering the window between the speakers.  Rolling up the blinds solved the problem.

3. How correct are you?
RM 40's in a large, completely undamped room.  No bass, and a harsh, grainy sound to the presentation.  Control settings and bass damping adjustments did nothing.  Good equipment: big BAT pre and 500W amp, Proceed CD, outboard anti-jitter/room correction software.  After a bad hour I asked to hear the system without the correction/jitter (another step is to drive the power amp with the CD player, bypassing the pre/pro to see what the short signal path sounds like).  Taking out the "improvement" (room/antijitter) cured the problems.  Told the guy to sell that stuff.  Do some manufacturers ever listen to their gear, or are they completely hung up with measurements?

4. Have a Helmholtz!
I have encountered the "alcove effect" half a dozen times: the speakers are set up with a resonant space formed by a deep window or alcove beside or behind the speaker.  Drapes, tube traps or pulling shutters closed cures this, but don't expect a large cavity in proximity to the speakers to do anything but resonate.  One of these setups was at a reviewer's house; he had never noticed the problem.

5. Now that's unusual!!
Picture a large 25x30' basement with a 6 1/2ft ceiling, all bare concrete with some lawn furniture scattered about, a pair of Tower II's in opposing corners, firing towards each other and the center of the room.  Acoustic nitemare, right?  Sorry, it was great, though imaging was kind of non-specific.  Who'da thunk it. One of the best residential sounds I've heard, and source was a receiver and $200 CDP.

[J Harris]

Very enlightening indeed, Brian, especially that last comment. I've encountered similarly bizarre setups at the homes of non-audiophiles that sounded great.

It's GOT to be useful, as a loudspeaker designer, to see all the weird things that real people do in their actual homes.

J!

[Horsehead]

I would absolutely agree with the comments about the outboard processing devices.  I was using a "24/96 upsampler/jitter device between my transport and Pass Labs D-1 DAC and for a while the sound was just not "right".  It was bugging me and one day I removed the device and everything snapped back into place. Was not even close- the damn thing was killing the sound of my system.  I think sometimes we insert things we think are supposed to make a positive difference, leave them there for a while, get used to the sound, looking to change other things, and it was that one device that really changed the system in a negative way.  Oh well, live and learn I guess.

[Endymion]

1) I tried my speakers on either side of my fireplace.  I couldn't get good bass until I moved them to another side of the room as the chimney appeared to be resonating (in fact at a certain bass frequency the metal in the chimney would rattle).

2) My Denon 5800 was giving me bad bass even though I had the speakers set to full.  I finally generated some test tones and used a scope on the outputs.  It had a nasty filter on the bass.  I reset the processor and it cleared the filtering.   Now I use the Denon only for DVD/TV playback and use an Ayre preamp and a Theta Dreadnaught for audio.

[soundguy3]

I recently tried an upsampler with my older EAD 7000 and EAD T-1000.  I ended up sending it back.  It put everything too far forward and I lost the depth and width of the soundstage......took it out of the signal path and everything was back to normal!

Sguy3