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I have decided to redo Cardas in my room over the next few days. Last time I had to make some compromises also to achieve the best of all... I want to start over but have a measuring question...My room is 173" (14' 5") wide from left wall to right wall. But at the speakers, the wall to the right is a series of four tall 12 pane windows and their woodwork. The windows are covered in heavy velvet curtains... If I measure the room width right in front of the speakers, the room is 178" (14'10") from left wall to the right window panes... So, the windows are inset another 5" from the woodwork and of course all behind the curtains.Do I use the 173" room width? The 178" room width? Or maybe even split the difference?Looking forward to starting fresh and tweaking from there again.Jason
I am a believer in getting one's speakers and listening position out from walls and corners if possible (unless they're Klipsch cornerhorns).
Room energizing is about how sound waveforms interact with a room. Those that are bouncing around the room shouldn't be arriving too soon to your ears else your room will impose itself on a recording.
Quote from: jriggy on 24 Dec 2009, 04:43 amI have decided to redo Cardas in my room over the next few days. Last time I had to make some compromises also to achieve the best of all... I want to start over but have a measuring question...My room is 173" (14' 5") wide from left wall to right wall. But at the speakers, the wall to the right is a series of four tall 12 pane windows and their woodwork. The windows are covered in heavy velvet curtains... If I measure the room width right in front of the speakers, the room is 178" (14'10") from left wall to the right window panes... So, the windows are inset another 5" from the woodwork and of course all behind the curtains.Do I use the 173" room width? The 178" room width? Or maybe even split the difference?Looking forward to starting fresh and tweaking from there again.JasonJason- Hi. Split the difference if you can center your listening position. And, please, tell me, at least, the depth of your room. Also, what is between you and your speaks if anything and beside them and what kind of speaks you are using so I and we can look them up. Back to you tomorrow.
Maybe reflections and other audiophile no-no's like diffraction are appealing to me. I wouldn't be surprised.……….Some speakers are designed to be placed right up against the back wall, or in the corner. Placing them into the middle of the room messes up their design criteria.QuoteRoom energizing is about how sound waveforms interact with a room. Those that are bouncing around the room shouldn't be arriving too soon to your ears else your room will impose itself on a recording. I think the room is going to impose itself on the recording no matter what we do (within reason). A speaker should be designed to be placed in a typical living room to complete its sonic picture, not to fight with it. Rear ported speakers with wide baffles tend to work well for me in this regard. Unfortunately, these designs don't seem to be very popular anymore. I guess they are just too old fashioned. Or maybe I am.
…. After reading some of the posts, I used the Cardas calculator and moved my speakers 56.25" from the sidewalls per the calculation. All I can say is WOW! Insturments became more focused, much better bass extension, detail and slam. I am hearing the individual strings of a bass guitar on good bass runs. There is greater clarity, more "air" around the different instruments. What amazed me is that the center stage instruments and vocals actually seem to move back in the soundstage--more recessed as Jim has posted. The Daedalus DA-1.1s have two tweeters offset by 10 degrees with gives me a very wide sweet spot and speakers that fill the room with sound. In the new location the sound remains stable when I move out of a center listening postion. I still have a wide soundstage but there has been a marked improvement in focus, detail and soundstage depth. I don't sense that I have lost any warmth. The speakers are 72" from the front of the woofer to the wall behind the speakers, an increase of 4" and still within the Rives calculation (68 to 74). The Cardas calculator would locate the speakers 91" from the wall behind the speakers, which puts them too far out into the room given that the room also doubles as a family/entertaining room. My listening position is 11' from the speakers and the speakers are 7' 6" apart (center of woofer to woofer).The Cardas calculated distance from the side walls sure made a noticeable improvement. Count me among the believers on the side wall distance. Rives took into account my furniture, the big TV, etc. when he designed the treatment package and calculated the front distance. That distance which is 19' less than Cardas works great in my room……..
Hello,My earlier post was a bit of a misswrite, in terms of room pressurization, and I picked that up in the few replies that followed, but it has taken a while to get the time to hopefully correct my misswrite.ALL speakers will pressurize the room they are in, as that is how the sound is made. This has nothing to do with Master Set. Whether the speaker uses cones, as most do, the rapid cone movement will pressurize the air in the room. Other types of speakers do it all differently, but in the end they pressurize the air in the room. If there is any doubt about that, just take your speakers outside and listen to how they sound.However, at room boundaries, i.e. walls, floor, and ceiling, the sound will want to reflect. Dealing with this is pretty much standard, although sidewalls usually create the most troubles. But if you are 3 feet plus out from a sidewall and with a decent toe in, sidewall reflections are minimized quite a bit. Speakers are forward firing and can be much closer to the wall behind them as there is not much to be reflected, even with a rear port, as I have.What differentiates Master Set is that one speaker is set as an "anchor" speaker, and you position the other speaker so that the room is equally pressurized from both speakers at the same time. The net result is a single source of sound from the two speakers. This means that when you the listener move around the room, the sound stays put and does not move around with you. This may or may not seem important to you, that's for you to decide.With most any other way of putting speakers in the room you can always get good sound if you sit in the middle of the two speakers as you will get the most equal sum of the two at the one position. But if you move from that one position, the sound will move with you and will change and be different.Essentially you can set the speakers to be a single source of sound, or you can have a single seat of listening.Also, I have just looked at my AC Master Set gallery, and one of the photos has gotten quite a lot of looks. I may have tweaked things since those photos were taken, but things are essentially the same.Steve
Bryan, depth is very important to me too.I increased depth some by adding absorption to the front and rear walls when my rear-ported Dyn's were 3' from the front wall. This also brought the critical midrange forward and subtle queues just off center and to the L&R behind the spkrs was lost. Bass response was good though in part due to bass trapping. Pulling them out to 61" increased my soundstage immensely in all directions. This distance is 1/3 the length of my room. The forwardness of the midrange relaxed back to all around the spkrs. Subtle queues appeared that were lost before and the mid-bass response was more coherent.Everybodies room plays a huge part in what we hear from our systems...I remember when I bought my inexpensive JBL outdoor spkrs. The 1st time I listened to them was in my room. They did not sound good at all. Then I took them outside and the difference was like night and day.
Steve, I had a look at your room pictures. I don't believe there are rights and wrongs but I do believe there are some truths about speaker placement that are generally always applicable. Your speakers do look to be very close to the front wall. Almost like your speakers are one of those UK designs like Rega etc that do need to be close to the front wall. They are designed that way because many UK rooms are small and constrained. I believe these designs are usually front ported but I could be wrong. And I don't know if your speakers are designed to be close to the front wall. Anyway, I have the belief that when speakers are very close to the front wall the stereo imgage depth is going to be very flat. I strive for dynamics and good frequency response first in speaker placement. Then I'd say that getting that seamless wall of sound, energized room with disappearing speakers comes next. Then comes imaging. And then final spatial cues like imaging, soundstage width and soundstage depth. I have always found without exception, but with limited experience, the closer speakers are to the front wall, the less depth there is. And out of all the spatial elements, depth is probably most important to me. Especially when listening to acoustic music, classical orchestra or choral for instance. Or jazz bands. I guess I want it all. And I can't imagine that having speakers so close to the front wall would give me all of it. Maybe one can get excellant depth with speakers close to the front all and I just have not heard it yet.Bryan
When Steve discusses MS, he uses the term “pressure” a lot. I can’t wrap my head around that concept.
This has been an interesting discussion and brought back a memory of a few years ago when I visited a Vienna Acoustics dealer. I remember just how great those speakers sounded in the display room and remember noting that they were placed very close to the wall behind them and on the long wall. They used a Rel sub blended into the mains and the bass was so articulate. I couldn't afford them at the dealer at the time but bought a pair and sub used shortly after. I never got the same sound out of them! I attributed that to my room, gear or any number of other things. I wonder, since I used a Cardas setup if I had tried the MS, which was what the dealer used apparently, I would have seen an improvement? Fast forward to today, I no longer have those VA speakers but I want to try the MS setup for experimentation sake. My system is in a different room and all the components have changed since then. The only issue I see is trying to enlist the help of my wife to move the speakers. She probably won't be very keen about that!
Perhaps you could get a better understanding of "pressure" here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound
There is definitely something interesting in MS which in my mind is the concept of not worrying about distance but using SPL to define the correct placement of the left and right speakers.It cannot solve room modal problems with movements of 1/8" inch because of the wavelengths of these frequencies. For example 100Hz has a wavelength of approx 11ft. Moving a speaker out of a location where there is a room mode peak cannot be done without movements of about a quarter wavelength, in this case 2-3ft.But there have been a number of peer reviewed scientific studies performed that show that we can detect SPL difference of 0.5dB (a very small difference, within many manufacturers quality tolerance levels). So maybe MS is assisting in equalizing the SPL at the listening position for situations where there are different amounts of boundary gain due to difference in the room construction, dimensions or speaker placement relative to the walls.I think one of the issues with the Cardas technique is that speakers end up being placed very far into the room. Most speaker designers will factor in some amount of boundary gain when designing their speakers such that they sound optimal where most people would put them, which would be 2 or 3ft max from the front wall. Hence when pulled out to 6 ft from the wall they sound thin and lifeless due to lack of energy int he mid bass.
....... So maybe MS is assisting in equalizing the SPL at the listening position for situations where there are different amounts of boundary gain due to difference in the room construction, dimensions or speaker placement relative to the walls. ......
