damped room kills imaging

[Cobblers]

I find just a few inches can make an enormous difference.
Can you not put an extra cushion behind your back?
I think just one or two inches out each way with the settee could make a notable difference.

I have repositioned my speakers a couple of weeks ago with wider dispersion (as I am making space on that wall for a small 37 inch plasma which is on order -a model which has lower power consumption than many 1080p LCD's incidently)
I found this improved imaging location and clarity, despite greater potential for early reflections from the right hand speaker (which is now close to the door alcove -despite this bass is still quick, clean and well balanced).

A typical reflex speaker would boom horribly this close to the wall.

I expect imaging will improve yet further without the large wobbly CRT sitting between them.

Have you tried raising the speakers on plinths to reduce reflections from the floor?
Taller stands improved the performance of the WD25's.

[colin.hepburn]

Yep I think I will try some of that wool stuff on back wall and door trouble is making it look good maybe a light cloth covering on and some sort of image printed on it? Ail l try moving the settee out as you say the CRT TV will not help but it is set back so the speakers are out past it short of knocking the back wall out into next door theirs not much I can do there

[Greg.]

Certainly if your listening chair is close to a rear wall the listening position is critical and just moving forward a few inches can make a significant difference. I also have this situation and with the wall behind completely bare, I had a harsh and undirectional sound. Simple adding a hung picture no bigger than 3' x 2' sorted it. My message is don't go mad with purchases of hanging rock wool etc. Experiment a bit at a lower level and you can (I suspect) easily resolve your problem.

[colin.hepburn]

Hi Greg
Thank you for your input on this. I have a set of curtains I can try draping over the rear wall and something in the corner. I have tried firing the speakers down the room but didn’t really help as sound just reflects of the wall where the boiler is, I am considering adding a false corner for the left speaker to even up the space between side wall a left speaker not to big a job

[Cobblers]

I would be wary of doing this.

The false wall could produce more similarity in the bass balance/response (i.e both speakers sound the same). However you may find 2 wrongs do not make a right, and the sound could be cleaner as it stands.

The left speaker might be producing cleaner deep bass than the right because of the right's proximity to the wall, which may not be directly audible (since deep bass is non directional of course).

I agree with Greg,
I think the heavy DIY might be a bit OTT at this stage, I expect you could get better sound with some experimentation with speaker toe in (or not), closer to back wall while further from side walls or opposite of this etc etc.

Like Greg I sit fairly close to the back wall in both listening rooms (like most people in small houses I expect), and my back walls are well covered with CD's, DVD's clothes, and sundry items. Absolutely no problems with harsh sound or flat imaging.

[G.Axiom]

Well it's really a dead simple measurement to find out the reverberation time/spectrum- graphs of the listening room.

A good studio or a good monitoring/editing/mastering enviroment is a compeletely different animal compared to a good domestic listening enviroment. IMHO.
There is actually a pretty wide window for acceptable reverberation times in a listening room, generally 300-800 ms's. The most important factor is even distribution of reverberation time over the entire spectrum. In many typical listening rooms, it's very, very difficult to achieve reasonable distribution of reverberation times over entire audible spectrum because of the room mode interactions in lower freqwencies, usually messing up most of the critical midrange also with their nasty upper intermodulation freqwencies.

Unfortunately, there is no easy cure to this problem. You should whether to move to an wooden house, with superstructure which does not causes those nasty peaks in lower freqwencies, or you must simply have a very, very large listening room. As rooms measures grows, it's resonance modes gets lower.

Anyway, I think that most of the dedicated listening rooms I have visited has been overly damped, over entire audible spetrum. Room dampening is the most effective way to excessively eat up power. Right above the passive XO :P It also makes you to listen mostly just direct, non-diffuce sound, which is a very effective way to force you to listen just a loudspeaker, and all of its flaws.
I agree with Cobblers in his opinion that a pinpoit imaging is just a nice effect. Airy, non-loudspeaker-but-lifelike size and integration with listening room are far more important and difficult qualities to the "imaging".

Dipole, cardiode, horn... even directivity of a loudspeaker over the entire audible spectrum is the only effective mean to heal the disease cured in this thred with "room dampening". And, "Room dampening" has next-to-nothing to do with imaging.

Remember, my friend: listening room is your friend. Don't make it to your enemy!

Edit: Again, I see that a bottle or two of a good red wine does not makes any good to my english. I'll edit this to some more understandable shape in one of those days, if I'll live after tomorrow

[Mike H]

Originally Posted by Richard

If the speakers are too close to the walls the reflected and direct sounds arrive too close together time-wise and the image is not clear.

Yes I've experienced this - but what if you can't move the speakers away from the walls though? (room/available space not big enough). I had this problem, treble reflections all over the place so's the 'stereo image' keeps moving about. Solution I found was to hang curtains between the speakers and the adjacent walls. I used bath towels (seriously!) hung on fitted rails. Works a treat. Especially in an old building like ours which rooms' layout was designed long before stereos were invented, tiled fireplaces and all. Only real problem is colour-matching the bath towels to your decor (and it is a problem)

Originally Posted by Ianm2

the bbc use the live end, dead end principle, where the speaker end is the live end, and the listener end is the absorbent end, I have a rug of sorts on the wall behind me, and that improved things.

That's a good idea, must try that. Certainly noticed there's a difference whether my head is close to the wall behind me vs a position 2 or 3 feet forward of it. Also some tendency for reflections off the ceiling - have been considering should I get ceiling tiles (shudder!)

[Greg.]

With your head against thre back wall you'll get a 3dB lift in the bass.