Audiophiles hifi appreciation thread old and new

How do I change the room mode?

Change the dimensions of the room. You can change the way the speakers interact with the room by moving them but there are some wavelengths that will be cancelling themselves out because of the size of the room. They are called room modes. It's quite likely that you have a pronounced lower bass which makes you think the mid bass is too low.

What @Airhead said. You can also attempt to lessen them with absorption materials (not very real-life friendly) or roughly mitigate the effects with EQ/DSP.
Moving the speakers to where they’re designed to be, relative to walls/corners should help get their ‘natural’ sound.

ah cool, thanks. Yeah, I'm working on positioning too, but (variable) sound resonance through the floor (especially a floating wooden floor) makes it really hard as theoretically better positioning might have worse floor-related resonance. So I'm looking to take the floor out of the equation as much as possible. It's all about trade-offs I guess.

Do you have any heavy rugs/carpet on the floor? That can help

Any suggestions for a rechargeable DAB radio, preferably splashproof, with a relatively small footprint (~10cm x 10cm) for a bathroom radio. I just keep getting Bluetooth speakers, things that went out of production years ago or radios that take batteries when I search. Cheers.

How solid/locked together is the floor? Is it individual floorboards or sheets of chipboard?
It’s worth trying some iso methods but unless you’re getting rattling or some narrow resonance peaks from individual boards, I wouldn’t expect a huge difference at normal volumes - if it’s properly fixed that’s a huge amount of mass to get moving.

@Dramatic_Hammer @danb
Solid oak panelled floor, tongue and groove, floating not fixed. Most of the rest of the floor is covered with a big, heavy rug. my suspicion is that the stands are using the floor (and the space under the floor) like a sound box, so I want to set them up on plinths of some sort and isolating feet.

@Dramatic_Hammer we live quite close to each other, perhaps pop over for a listen one evening :)

Sounds fancy! It’s possible you’re getting some kind of resonator chamber effect there - what are the stands/speakers?

Do we? Whereabouts are you then? I have some speaker spikes/feet and acoustic foam pads you could trial...

Legend. I’ll pm you

this is insane. My new (to me) amp hasn't arrived yet and I'm already negotiating on its upgrade / replacement with a seller. My plan is to then upgrade the speakers to get the best out of the replacement amp, and after that I'll replace the amp again to get the best out of the new speakers. Once that's done I'll replace the speakers again to get the most out of that new amp.

By this point I'll have sold my flat, furniture and kidneys.

Seriously this is what it must be like having a gambling addiction...

Slippery slope. Maybe slow down and enjoy the journey :)

I know, right? Thank goodness, he sold the amp so I’m safe for the time being. I think I was just getting an itchy Ebay trigger finger waiting for the power amp to be delivered.

New amp is in, sounds good. Definitely a noticeable improvement to mid and lower end definition. I’m pretty sure I’ll be sorted with just a set of plinths for the speakers.

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Very nice looking space. Not surprised you're having problems though, convention would dictate that you will have a lot of issues with bass with the speakers positioned like that.

you will have a lot of issues with bass with the speakers positioned like that

😭

so now I'm thinking about one of these

review: https://www.avforums.com/review/dspeaker-anti-mode-2-0-dual-core-review.355
thoughts?

you'll be chasing your tail

listen to the sset up first, get used to the sound and have a fuck around with it to see where you can get with it.

isn't it just REW in a box with a set of tone controls though?

Lol

That is pretty high end. Can you get permission to change the room so it works? Would be a lot cheaper and more natural a solution.

I'm a big fan of DSP and it's got very good these days. Natural solutions would always trump it IMO though. If you're really not allowed to move the furniture and create a listening position that works then DSP might be the only/best answer.

Dirac is a very popular version that's supplied in boxes like the one you linked to. Correcting IR and EQ.

On a simple level you do understand the massive glass cupboard in the corner of the room might function as a very unusual resonator.

When I installed the the audio system in my van (5channel, 4 way high-end components) I did something very similar with parametric eq profiles to tune and shape the sound at the pre-amp stage. Obviously you have to do this in a car as you can't shape the room in any meaningful way.

In all seriousness, it was recommended to me by someone with something upwards of a £50k hifi setup who used one to create an eq profile for his room because "the room is always an issue". Given that any set up is always going to involve trade-offs (I'm not going to install bass traps or put my speakers in the middle of the room) there's no reason that a custom (to that room) parametric eq profile shouldn't play a part in improving the sound arriving at my ears. If you read the audiophile reviews, literally everyone raves about this device: here, here, here, here...

Otherwise, what should I adjust? Sure, I can spend £hundreds on new feet for my speaker stands (sadly that's probably going to have to happen), or I can upgrade the speakers and still have problems (these speakers are plenty capable of the quality that normal ears like mine will fall in love with if I can get them to deliver ).

Well it's only my approach but it seemed to start working for me when I got hold of some very flat speakers (monitors in my case) and positioned them close enough to me that the room effect lessens. At the same time trying to get them away from room perimeters. It's been a long journey for me though, lots of money spent, lots of fun regardless. I have accepted that speakers need to be away from the back wall or you need to reduce the bass, wall and corner you need 6db reduction in the bass.

So basically try and create a triangle where your listening position is roughly as far away from the speakers as the speakers are from each other and get them away from the walls, then you are hearing the speakers less than the room. In my room there's one point where it's pretty flat, in some corners the bass is 6db or more higher, really noticeably booming.

I agree with you and your friend that DSP could work in this system though. I do use it myself depending on the speakers and positioning, its also very useful if you are running a sub.

Looks like an interesting piece of kit but those reviews reminded me why I avoid audiophile writing. So much guff!

Also the comments. Talking about optical cable quality.

On a simple level you do understand the massive glass cupboard in the corner of the room might function as a very unusual resonator.

Sadly I'll be shown the door before the glass cupboard is. It was made for a piece of woodwork, family heirloom from my GFs grandparents.

Your advice, as always, is really appreciated. At the moment I have less bass than i expect in quite a specific range, probably around -3db in the 100-150Hz range if my ears are functioning. The drop was wider before the new amp (perhaps -6db at 100-300Hz) but it's still definitely there. I don't hear much in the way of bass boom in listening position , though I haven't bothered putting my head in the corners of the room. More importantly, if I move around the room I don't hear any meaningful change in the sound profile. This tells me it's less about the room mode and more to do with how the air is being driven, though I totally accept I'm making things harder for myself by having the speakers so close to the wall along the long edge of the room.

There's an alternative perspective on this which is the highs and upper mids are just a little too present due to the perky little cyrus amp, and I could treat this with HF sound absorbing panels, but I'm sceptical because even at higher volumes the speakers aren't delivering - the weight in the upper and mid bass range is just a little bit disengaged. And this is why I was looking at other amps yesterday, I was worried that it's the combination of amp and speakers that is the problem. I know I'm being picky but I have decent hearing and I know it's just not quite right yet.

Tomorrow I'm going to walk around with an (albeit uncalibrated) mic and run a pink noise generator to give me a better sense of what is going on in different areas on the room.

Edit: the other thing I'm going to do is temporarily move the speakers to the short wall, place them away from the wall and sit myself down one third of the room's length away from the opposite wall. If I get the sound I'm looking for I know it's at least possible from the set up without spending any money on further equipment (which is my goal).

Some good news, GF hasn't noticed the extra black box on the shelf. Win!

cheers all again

just in case it's useful here's a quick before and after from my van using a pink noise generator, an uncalibrated mic, my ears and parametric EQ profiling. Before I got to this stage I spend some time tuning the crossover points and of course it's had a lot of sound deadening fitted. In this example I was fixing the dead spots at 300hz and 1khz as well as rolling off the peaks at 150hz and 2khz. I've since reshaped this profile to reduce the bass peak at ~50Hz, but you get the idea...

The resultant difference in listening experience was, as you can imagine, literally incredible.

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