Room Treatment and Sibilance

If your receiver supports room correction, use that in addition to the treatments.

Try not aiming the speakers directly at you from such a short distance. I am playing with a pair of Dynaudio Focus 110As and have them tilted up and not toed-in. No problem with sibilance.

The Dynaudio table stands or Auralex MoPads would do fine or you can rig up something ad hoc.


I do not know what you mean by that.

The large glass window on the right side is acting as a big reflecting surface from which sound waves coming from the speakers will bounce and cause wave inference and general muddiness. If you don't already have some, put some soft curtains (not blinds) around them and keep them closed during critical listening. They will act as absorbers and tame those reflections, at least on the right side. That's one inexpensive treatment.

Kal's suggestion of the Auralex Mopads is excellent (I just got some Speaker Dudes from Auralex and they are terrific, but overpriced). You need to raise those speakers off the desk for two reasons. One, you want to get the tweeters to be as close to ear-level height as possible (ear-level while you are sitting in listening position, not standing). Two, you want to de-couple the speakers from the surface of the desk. This will keep your desk from vibrating with the speakers and acting as a sort of giant speaker itself. It will also improve the clarity of the sound from the speakers, as the sound waves coming from them won't be getting so much interference from the reflections off the hard surface of your desk.

You do need bass traps of some sort in all of your room's corners, to the extent practical. The lower frequency waves have the longest wave lengths and thus bounce around the most in your room. Eventually, they make it to every corner and back to your ears, causing boominess and a lack of tightness in the bass. Bass traps minimize the reflecting of those bass waves all over your room by absorbing them and keeping them in the corners, where they won't bounce back and through wave interference cause nulls and peaks at your listening point (this also requires optimum subwoofer placement with respect to your listening point).

That will not help one bit. If that is what the shop recommended, they have no clue.

are you sitting off-set between your speakers ???

I agree. I am sitting in my office/study with a pair of the Focus 110As on the top of the storage unit about 33" high. They are being fed from a Squeezebox Touch and the sound is balanced with good bass and smooth treble. No sibilance. Also, no room treatments/EQ/tone controls.

from your diagram, it looks like you are not sitting in the center of your Left/Right speakers --- you appear to be sitting further on the right side. any reason for this?

Another source will not matter either. Does this issue happens with all your music discs or just some? Recordings could have sibilance in them.

If that is the case, then I think you have source issues,Cds, not component issues. Need better recordings.

I think some of your answer was in your original post. What did you observe when you were trying other sources and amps? Were the speakers as sibilant with a different source or amp feeding them? If so, I think that is the key, that your receiver is too hot in the upper midrange or is somehow eq'ing the signal noticeably.

It has become very common for people to state that room treatments are a requirement for a system to sound good. While I agree to a point, room treatments are never going to be a negative unless you go way overboard on them, they should not be required for music to sound clear and clean. We have gone for 60 or so years of audiophiles setting up stereos, surround sound, quadrophonics, etc and it is only in the last couple years that the idea of room treatments has become common when discussing home audio. They have always been a bit of a mystery before that, and were experimental at best for most people. Having recently added a bunch of room treatments myself, I can say that properly setup and calibrated gear got me 90% of the way, and the treatments have been a nice addition to finish off the experience for me. The impacts they made were in smooth pans, less reflected echo, and lower noise floor in the room.

Which receiver is too hot in the mid band? Perhaps you can help us by showing a frequency plot, not guessing.
Modern receivers, well designed are flat, period.

Well, that is modern except for perhaps some codec capability.

Not saying at all that it should be, but if there is a problem with a receiver and a different receiver does not display the same characteristics, then the problem may be in what the receiver is amplifying. He did mention that he had recently had it serviced, so it may not be operating as it is supposed to.

Why not look into getting a PS3. It's one of the best sources for bluerays and it is an ok cd player. Trust me with a cheap blueray player you will hate the amount of time it takes to load a disc. Look into get a used PS3 from gamestop or amazon. I know it's probably more than you want to spend but it is worth it.