Non directional sound for filling a room

[RobWells]

I'm assuming the OP was asking about having decent even coverage for the whole room for when lots of people are present...

I would find a surround receiver that has a 'party' setting where all speakers get the same signal, and run a six point one setup using 3 pairs of decent smaller bookshelf speakers. Instead of setting up the front 3 speakers as 'normal' I would just put all speakers quite high evenly around the walls. maybe 1 each end on the shorter walls and the other ones at 1/3 and 2/3 along the longer walls. I'd run a multiple small sub setup to give a more even bass response.

If you wanted to you could get very directional horn tweeters to cover the individual zones and avoid some of the interference between speakers.

Rob.

[graaf]

Originally Posted by Juhazi

I think that ceiling is better place than floor, acoustically. The problem is how to install them. And if you are not happy, what then?

Originally Posted by johngore

Any benefit of up firing from the floor vs down from the ceiling? Floor has more stuff blocking the sound, like furniture.

up-firing at the ceiling is not just more convenient (You can move the speaker around) but in fact has a major advantage acoustically - much wider uniform coverage because what You listen to is the sound reflected off the ceiling

the ceiling in a typical living room is plain and reflective

any stuff on the floor blocking or scattering the direct sound is actually good

ps. one speaker for mono, two for stereo - anything more than that, forget about uniformity or coherence

[boswald]

You don't need to stick to mono. And imaging is an awkward term, which we all use whilst we try to define it. "They are here" "You are there" etc.

I would say that the Walsh 2s put an image in the air that is "they are here" with mono, and either with stereo, depending on the recording. The volume is fairly even throughout the room, unless you are on top of them. As you move about, the music seems to stay in the same place.
If you look straight at the speakers, it's weird how you cannot place the sound as from the speakers.
I really enjoy the Ohms, but I do not actually buy into the Walsh theory. Empirically, we know it works to keep us from putting our faces into the on-axis beam that occurs as the wavelengths shrink with increasing frequency, but the transmission mode model does not fly, as we know that if we simply avoid going too high, we can just point the cone concave up.
All the fancy shapes(of the diffusers/whatchcallems) are just speaker porn, though beauty is not at all a bad thing, and some are very pretty.

I have placed all sorts of small speakers on top of the cans, no effect on the sound or image till the box was much bigger than the can. Sound is not light, it is pure wave, it is diffracting right around.

As to ceiling vs. floor placement, the first reflections are the most problematic, so flush in a ceiling;- in a box, listen to Graaf, clutter and softness are your friends.

Another word about imaging. As a notorious late adopter, I was buying my first cassette deck in 1978, from a reviewer who had a pair of Wilson 'gasbag' speakers(no idea of model) to test.
He played a mono tape of a David Bromberg show. They were definitely there. These were conventional in the sense of being a wide baffle set on top of the pressurised-gas woofer boxes.
The image was above and between the rather large speakers, which you could not place as the source.

So after all this, what is my point? We are after a pleasing illusion, of which there are various sorts, made in all sorts of ways. You should try at least a handful of ways in a problem room, borrow, mock up, don't buy or finish-build until you have, and you can be happy for a long time when you are done.

[phivates]

Have a look at the AR LST models

[TMM]

The 'sweet spot' with stereo speakers happens because there exists an axis where you are equidistant from both left and right, so the mono content from each speaker is in phase. When the listener moves out of the sweet spot the mono content from the speakers becomes out of time/phase so you get nulls in the frequency response at the listening position. Our intuition is to move back into the sweet spot to get the flat frequency response.

I think the trick may just be to add more speakers so there are longer any sweet spots in the room - nulls and cancellation occur at every listening position. Arranging four speakers as L R L R would probably be a start. Room reflections function as 'virtual speakers' and will help the effect, so aiming speakers off-axis to the intended listening positions should help a lot. Speakers which are omni directional or at least have a wide beam will probably help also. Of course, this goes against everything you want for a stereo system with a defined 'image', so what you probably want are two separate speaker system/setups.

[johngore]

Thanks for the advice. The LxMini are still directional for the tweeters. Those Duevels look interesting. But, based on the LxMini's woofer being very omni without a spindle, I dont know that the woofer needs a spindle - and as boswald said, much of the sound will diffract anyway.

The Bose 601 look like they use multiple tweeters to spread the sound so some is direct and some bounces. The AR LST look like they need a big room.

Ill go experiment with placing the LxMinis around the room and bouncing the tweeter sound.

An impractical approach would be a wall of sound to simulate being far away from a point source.

[graaf]

Originally Posted by johngore

Ill go experiment with placing the LxMinis around the room and bouncing the tweeter sound.

You may like the result of placing them side-by-side with 90 degrees toe-out

[boswald]

The LXmini's 2" is 4pi through about half its usage, about 4k. A neighbor tried a 1/2" as a super for further omni range(he thought he wanted more extension also). All I know is they were gone when he sent the speakers to his daughter(lucky kid). I'll ask when he returns from his winter southern escape.

[graaf]

Originally Posted by Elias

Hello,

I've been listening for a few hours with the 2-way monopole in ceiling firing arrangement. The box is placed beside a wall on the floor and I'm listening at 2 to 5 meters distance.

Again this was a MONO setup with one speaker.

I tested the setup by listening Bach organ works and Bach motets.


Some observations:

* a little bit surprisingly I cannot localise the speaker at the floor, it never happened.

* the sound is coming a bit far away, from 'somewhere'.

* it sounds like I'm beeing constantly off axis because the tonal balance is different when placed at the floor beside the wall, so I had to use EQ to correct that.

* there is no sweet spot in the room. If I stay more than 2 meters from the speaker the sound is the same everywhere.

* turning my head has no effect on the sound, nice. This is better than stereo in this regard I can even face backwards without a change in sound.