Antoniop wrote: 
> Hi Dave !
> You seems to be an endless source of knowledge regarding hifi ! Very
> interesting post indeed.
> Sorry, I was posting an answer to iPhone, and I'm very slow, my english
> flows too slowly.
> My room is a little sitting room, about 20 m² (67 ft), rectangular, I'll
> be approximatively at 10ft from each speaker, ceiling is at 9 ft heigh,
> walls are solid but it's open on each side of the room without doors (at
> right I have a kitchen and at left the living room and dining room).
> Floor is parquet and ceiling is solid. The room has a few furniture: a
> sofa (where I sit in front of the speakers), an upright piano (very nice
> old Pleyel, I'm proud of it), a little table at the corner of the sofa
> (for the drink of course) and a low dresser. 
> Thanks a lot for your help ! :)

Hi Antonio!

Thanks for the info, it's much easier to give specific advice based on
your actual room rather than to try to generalise!

Like everyone else on the forum (I guess, unless they listen out in
their garden, lol) the highest main modal resonance in your room will be
based on the floor to ceiling height, which is better than many people's
at 9', but will still be a shorter distance than that between any
parallel walls. The fact that your floor & ceiling are both solid makes
matters worse. But don't despair yet! If you are in love with your
(doubtless very pretty but also highly reflective parquet flooring, then
I would suggest a nice thick rug or two - you don't have to cover the
entire floor, any damping will improve the acoustic to some extent.
OTOH, if you don't mind covering it up, a THICK wall-to-wall wool carpet
on top of the thickest underlay you can get would be even better.

The open sides to your room will improve its acoustic, since the sound
will spill out into your kitchen on the one side, & your living & dining
room on the other: the effect will be as if you were in a larger
listening room. The conventional wisdom with a rectangular room is to
position the speakers on one of the long walls, 6 - 8 feet apart (&
certainly no more than 10', else you'll get a "hole" in the middle of
your stereo image unless you really turn the wick up!): however from
your description, I imagine that your walls with the door-less gaps are
the long ones, & that it will therefore be more ergonomic to put the
speakers across one of the shorter walls & sit to listen with your back
to the other one. This is OK, since the gaps in the side walls will
prevent the sound being unduly funnelled towards you. I would however
suggest that decent stand-mount speakers will give a more musical effect
than floor-standing speakers, because the former are less fussy about
being located relatively close to the wall behind, or even to being
fairly near the corner of the room (this will inevitably cause a LF
boost to a degree though, the bass radiates pretty much 360 degrees
around the speaker, it's the HF that is far more directional... ). If
you miss the lowest octave, a sub-woofer (or better yet 2, wired up in
stereo - not because you can hear an extreme LF stereo image: you can't,
but because having more than 1 source of low bass in the room,
especially doing different things, reduces room resonances) carefully
adjusted to match the LF roll-off of the stand-mounts, will sort that
out for you. The sub-woofer positioning is not critical, although it (or
they) should be in front of you, not behind. If you don't have it/them
close to your main speakers, you may find that they sound better with
the phase inverted - just try both settings, it'll be obvious which is
correct for the location. Then adjust the cross-over frequency to get a
good sound without overlapping or missing low frequencies & last of all
set the gain. -*Everyone*- sets it too high to start with, then you
detect some "boominess" after a while & keep edging the gain down for a
week or two until you finally get a smooth & natural effect. We're just
after a subtle reinforcement of the lowest notes...  ;)

The strings of your beloved piano will try to "sing along" as well if
you turn up the volume, which will be bad for a sharp image - I'd
suggest a half-brick or heavy door-stop strategically placed on the soft
pedal when you're not playing, lol.

That's my two pennyworth, I hope it helps...

Dave :cool:

P.S. Enjoy your drink - I'm currently on the Jack Daniels with Zero Coke
(in a separate glass, of course... ). Salut!


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