Continuously considering my options in my small townhouse living room. As the build is beginning to finalize I’m still going back and forth about the front mains. As of currently I have two bookshelves on shelves in the corners, the one on the right has the woofer (80hz to 300hz) slightly blocked by the loveseat and the whole sidewall being absorbed along most of the frequency spectrum. The left has the solid floor and wall free to reflect. In this configuration I’m thinking about an ottoman and fiberglass wall absorber to try to mimic the loveseats influence on the right speaker. Dsp is available to align path lengths and smooth peaks. Bookshelves are Anarchy 5.5’s and TB bamboo 3’s, fullrangers mostly for the tighter directivity considering the boundary challenges.
Another option is these tiny bookshelves with Dayton Rs100’s and now ND28’s but potentially swapping in the Peerless XT25’s for the tightening directivity. These will closely match the center channel with two RS100’s and DC28f large format tweeter in timbre and exactly match the low end roll off for a ~100hz subwoofer integration, subwoofer on bottom tv shelf. But, of course, the stereo triangle will become acute, around 20* from the listening position. I may place a 1“ absorber over the top of the shelf, below each speaker here while setting the lcr’s further back to have midrange absorption to about 45*, I realize 1” fiberglass is a compromise. Aside from the narrow imaging, which may make movies better seem to confine the sound to the screen size, the distance to the side walls will be quite different. Absorption on the left wall and behind the entertainment center is a definite option so the only major reflections will be the ceiling which will be much further and uniform. Remembering the LCR’s will be sitting on absorption and the tweeters will be getting directional around 4-5khz.
I know the sound quality suffers but I watch a good amount of my music on utube so maybe the tight LCR arrangement will more confine the image to match the screen. Again I have full dsp capabilities to combat the things that are realistic in each layout scheme. I’m equally partial to the larger and smaller bookshelves for different reasons.
Another option is these tiny bookshelves with Dayton Rs100’s and now ND28’s but potentially swapping in the Peerless XT25’s for the tightening directivity. These will closely match the center channel with two RS100’s and DC28f large format tweeter in timbre and exactly match the low end roll off for a ~100hz subwoofer integration, subwoofer on bottom tv shelf. But, of course, the stereo triangle will become acute, around 20* from the listening position. I may place a 1“ absorber over the top of the shelf, below each speaker here while setting the lcr’s further back to have midrange absorption to about 45*, I realize 1” fiberglass is a compromise. Aside from the narrow imaging, which may make movies better seem to confine the sound to the screen size, the distance to the side walls will be quite different. Absorption on the left wall and behind the entertainment center is a definite option so the only major reflections will be the ceiling which will be much further and uniform. Remembering the LCR’s will be sitting on absorption and the tweeters will be getting directional around 4-5khz.
I know the sound quality suffers but I watch a good amount of my music on utube so maybe the tight LCR arrangement will more confine the image to match the screen. Again I have full dsp capabilities to combat the things that are realistic in each layout scheme. I’m equally partial to the larger and smaller bookshelves for different reasons.
So I suppose that if you loose that corner lamp on the left side wall, you still don’t have the room to swap the sofa for the loveseat?
Reason you didn't move the speakers up a shelf to avoid most of the loveseat issue?
I would be concerned about the height cues from the 16” higher fullrange. If I had the small bookshelves it might not be an issue? The tweeter would be 12” higher than the center channel but that might not be too terrible with 5.1 for movies?
The woofer is only obstructed by about an inch or two and at 80-300hz I’m unsure if the waves are long enough where it doesn’t really affect it.
If the smaller bookshelves were turned upside down with the tweeter on the bottom the height ques could be lowered a smidge.
If the smaller bookshelves were turned upside down with the tweeter on the bottom the height ques could be lowered a smidge.
You can typically get away with a fair amount of vertical misalignment. Human sound localization is much coarser in the vertical direction than the horizontal. When you throw video into the equation too, your brain tends to compensate even more. I'd definitely try it if you can rearrange things easily.
My bigger concern is the difference at high frequencies where the first reflection area around the speaker is vastly different between the left and right sides. Absorbing more on the left will likely help, but I doubt you can easily recreate the overall result of what's going on on the right side with the speakers where they are.
There’s a lot going on with this speaker being basically contained between the loveseat and in the corner.
Would it be worth swapping in the xt25’s which have the same exact cutout? I feel like any position near the walls would benefit from some tightened dispersion, even if only starting above 4khz ish. I also bought the 1.25” domes without thinking about the center of the dome resonance, if that’s that much of an issue.
XT25 vs ND28 dispersion doesn't seem like a big enough difference to bother with to me.
I'm not sure what you were referring to in the "center of the dome resonance" comment.
I'm not sure what you were referring to in the "center of the dome resonance" comment.
I’ve looked at the smaller waveguide tweeters from scan, dayton, peerless and wavecore. I’m bound to a ~2.5” tweeter od with these 6.5” tall knockdown cabinets. I forgot the term, maybe breakup, where the center of a dome resonates out of phase. Not as severe as in metals but I’ve read it’s a thing in soft domes.
Honestly, I've not seen much in dome tweeters that worried me lately. Years ago there were nasty ones that made me leery of metal domes for a long time. The modern stuff seems remarkably consistent from a basic performance standpoint (at moderate price points and above). I'm sure there are still some bad ones out there, but major manufacturers seem to stay away from questionable approaches no matter the dome material.
That doesn't mean they all sound the same, have the same distortion characteristics, etc., but glaring badness is harder to find - thankfully.
That doesn't mean they all sound the same, have the same distortion characteristics, etc., but glaring badness is harder to find - thankfully.
It does when I have my 5.1 decoder board setup and running, right now it’s just summed mono which is decent enough.
I asked to find out if it was worth it to match your side channels to your center channel. If it had poor intelligibility then I was going to say don't worry about trying to match your left/right to your center.
I’ve been dialing in the tiny bookshelves with stereo subwoofers on the bottom shelves, a pair of Anarchy 704’s with Dayton reference 8” pr’s in half a cube tuned at 27hz. I like it like this so far and a little tasteful sound treatment on the left and a detailed dsp session should be satisfying for me. I appreciate the input and wanted to share the current direction.