[Rclark]

http://www.thecolonyatbearcreek.com/units/assets/42057/3x2.png


99% chance moving in the next few weeks. My room will be the master bedroom in the above Link (far righthand, largest room). As you can see it has an irregular shape with three doors, main, closet, bathroom.

How should I arrange the MMG's?

[neekomax]

Will you be listening from bed, or will you have a chair for your LP?

[gooberdude]

Looks like you can fill up your closet with clothes for bass trapping, or even hide some traps in the closet.

Placing the speakers in the diagonal corner might work.  I recently had my dipole speakers set up in a corner & the imaging was fantastic.

[Rclark]

I listen a lot from the bed but for critical listening (if you call sipping a cocktail in the sweetspot critical) I roll my chair over alongside the bed.

 generally the bed will face the speakers. I have already pared down from a lot of furniture and stuff in there so the only real big lump will be the bed, and it is low slung.

[Rclark]

Looks like you can fill up your closet with clothes for bass trapping, or even hide some traps in the closet.

Placing the speakers in the diagonal corner might work.  I recently had my dipole speakers set up in a corner & the imaging was fantastic.

That's encouraging! Was your room a goofy shape too? Im worried because it sounds spectacular in my current rectangle.

[JohnR]

You can't put them in the living room?

[Rclark]

 My monitors are going to the living room with my sub. This is my personal stereo rig.

[Minn Mark]

Might be woirth a call or e-mail to Magnapan with your diagram, and get their advice directly.

Mark

[Rclark]

I might just do that. I was just looking at the layout and am somewhat troubled by it. I may just put the stereo against that diagonal wall.

[SteveFord]

Get them off the floor a bit and they should be just fine listening from the bed, I would think.

[josh358]

Bed with its side against the diagonal wall and the speakers against the wall on the right, or bed with its side against the wall on the right with speakers against the diagonal wall. Or maybe, bed where it is, with speakers backed by the bath and closet, doors closed, and a chair by the pillows. Get them up as I think it was Steve who suggested, they image better that way anyway, at the cost of some bass. They should be vertical. The goal of all of this is to get a flat surface behind them rather than a corner.

I tried MMG's in a 14 x 16 rectangular room with a bed smaller than that seems to be and it did tend to block the sound, but with the bed against the wall arrangements should prevent that. The second (speakers on the right) seems to me to have the most potential, but I'm just eyeballing it, not sure if you could get back far enough (though I've found they work pretty well in the near field).

[Rclark]

Thanks Josh.

You know, I'm actually thinking this room might be an improvement over a rectangle after I get it treated. I can put them against that diagonal wall, 4' out, and there is pretty much no side reflection to worry about with those corners so far away. I can figure out some kind of treatments for the diagonal wall behind the MMG's.

 

[rollo]

 This room can be a blessing in disguise. My Maggies 3A's worked very well in a irregular shaped room. The angled wall appears to be best suited for your application.
  With no or minimal room treatment. Since you will have no sidewall reflections the tweeters can be on the outside which makes nice for imaging and soundstaging.
  have fun and good luck in your new home.

charles
SMA

[Rclark]

I'm gonna put the bed facing the speakers right next to the closet to where there's maybe a foot of space between the bed and the closet door. The hifi will be the main feature of the room and I think it will be quite an improvement. It will be like a listening room with a bed in it.

 I've been tossing around the idea of building a very large QRD type diffuser on the diagonal wall, but I have a lot (everything) to learn about room treatments and dipoles. It's just that I always see a diffuser between the speakers with Magnepans.

[josh358]

Diffusers are the most popular treatment, at the first reflection points on the wall behind the speakers (dipoles radiate most of their sound to the front and rear so side reflections are usually less of a problem than they are with boxes). One caution, you need to be IIRC 8' away from a QRD diffuser to avoid lobing, so if you're going to be listening closer to the wall than that you need to go another way. It also usually rules out QRD's on the side or rear wall in the typical smallish room.

Anyway the one thing I would stress is that acoustics can be unpredictable, it's not like we've ray traced this or anything and the room is an unusual shape. It can all depend on how the reflections happen to line up. So I'd go for a period of experimentation before fixing anything in stone. Maybe just the speakers, and then try adding the bed. I wouldn't buy any acoustic treatment until you know what the actual problems are. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, if forex your room ends up being on the bright side (don't think so because of the bed, but . . . ), you might want absorption rather than diffusion, etc.

[Rclark]

Thanks Josh. Everyone keeps hammering this point home and I guess I just need to accept the fact that I will need to invest in a microphone and some software to get the most out of this and to be able to plan out treatments.

 Thinking about that room shape, it kind of reminds me of an amphitheater, and I understand now why such structures are a half-circle shape. There are no hard side corners to reflect.

[josh358]

Yeah, not having real corners can be a plus. Measurement microphones are great, but honestly, your ears are going to tell you a lot more than the mics will, particularly in an unconventional setup like this one. So I'd begin by experimenting with position. Once you have a position that's practical and images well, or if you can't find one, you can start thinking about treatment. Measurement is a powerful plus if you want to treat or equalize the bass, but I don't know that it's necessary for tuning the overall brightness or finding sources of slap echo and early reflections -- more like a useful tool, particularly in the hands of an acoustician. E.g., if you see a reflection at 5 ms, you can look for a path that's about 5 feet. The main trick is to add treatment a bit at a time, it's easy to get carried away and end up with a room that sounds like a funeral parlor.

[Rclark]

... Have you dealt much with room treatment? Had such an experience?

... I actually took the time last night (still in the rectangle - don't move for a few more days) to bust out the tape measure and do the cardas setup for dipoles. Shockingly I was within an inch and a half off in terms of placement from the rear wall in terms of placed by ear versus calculated...
 
 But otherwise my speakers were pretty off (distance between speakers and distance from sidewalls, toe in) and once I had set them up as exacting as I could get based on the arithmetic, it was like a revelation to my ears and I understood why Cardas is so confident in his constants that are written to a ten-thousandth accuracy. The speakers really dissapear in those spots.

 I also bungee'd the MMG's down to the cardboard boxes I have them perched on (it's ok, if you didn't know, they are getting fully modded eventually), and used wedges beneath to get them completely vertical..

 Then popped in my brand new Rush R:30 concert Bluray and had my world rocked.

[josh358]

Heh, I had my MMG's on boxes as well, before I made stands.

I've had a good amount of experience with room treatment. Most of it has been in a professional setting, but the principles are the same, and so are the procedures, the main differences being that dipoles have a different radiation pattern, that acousticians are more practiced than your or I at translating measurements into action, and that you generally want a deader acoustic in the studio than you do at home. If you're interested enough to read Everest, Toole, and some of the online resources available, I think you'll find the subject very interesting, and measurement will give you some powerful tools, e.g., a waterfall plot can help identify troublesome ringing that produces one-note bass and pitch shift. You can put together a very powerful measurement system using freeware, a calibrated Behringer, and a full duplex sound card for very little, and get measurement capabilities that we could only dream of when I was an engineer.

However, this is really icing on the cake stuff. You don't need it to get good sound.

My remarks about dipoles are based on both personal experience (I've had Maggies for something like 30 years) and the recommendations of others, e.g., most people see to prefer diffusion to absorption behind Maggies, though there are exceptions, e.g., someone who told me that he listens mostly to chamber music and prefers to absorb the backwave.

Interesting about Cardas, I've never tried it. But I've had Maggies at most of the other "mathematical" locations, and I've found that they work just as they're supposed to. Unfortunately, the best locations for bass never seem to be the best locations for imaging and midrange clarity. I find I always go for the imaging and midrange, because the bass is easier to fix, but of course YMMV.

One thing I've found, though -- there are some aspects of placement and treatment that just can't be predicted. Even professional acousticians trim what they've done. Another thing I've found is that personal preference plays a role -- there's always some kind of compromise, and different people prefer different compromises, e.g., Jim Smith has found that his clients tend to prefer Maggies at somewhat less than the standard 60 degree stereo spread, but when I adjust my own, I always find that the tweeters end up at about 60 degrees.

[Minn Mark]

Sorry to butt-in on the OP but the responses prompt two questions from me:

Get them off the floor a bit and they should be just fine listening from the bed, I would think

1) I have opposite problem on some recordings: the image seems "too hig". Have 3.6 owners played with 'tilting' the speakers down toward the listening position?

Jim Smith has found that his clients tend to prefer Maggies at somewhat less than the standard 60 degree stereo spread

Can the poster clarify what he means by the "60 degree spread"? I use my 3.6 with their tweeters inside, and crossing in front of my listening position.

Many thanks,
Mark