Speaker questions for a newbie in his first home! - Page 2

I thought maybe you'd made a trip to Indonesia. They use puppets like the smaller ones in street shows.

xmai77 you have to do the best with what you got these other guys are way more into audio than you or me nothing wrong with that but some are overdoing it and maybe leading you in wrong direction for home theater setup. follow the dolby and almost every other diagram for home theater speaker placement it is the standard. Once you have room setup the best you can based on diagrams then you can decide if you want to take it farther or not. Only thing i can see that you could do for rears since there so close and narrow rear field is to mount them at 3 ft instead of 2 ft to get them further away from ears. hope i helped

Ethan it looks to me like your fronts are at ear height when sitting on floor

anyways pretty awesome setup im sure it sounds good but i would rather have those rears up higher and it looks like there at around 110 degrees not 135-150 as mentioned in your grammy HT speaker article
Edited by jb82 - 7/24/12 at 4:52pm

Whew. So no Santeria or Voodoo or anything. Good! They may even act as diffusers .
Cool conversation piece, though I'm sure if a normal, sane person walks in to the room and looked up around the ceiling, they might say "what the #$%^ is that"??? Extra mattresses for the guests?
Sorry to hear that. Keep the new guy on a strict regiment!

cheers,

AJ

You mean he doesn't just play one on TV?
That's fine, the problem is he isn't the mix engineer for each and every recording in his collection, any more than another Studiophile...and so when we see claims about "hearing what the mix engineer heard" and "accuracy" and "same setup", etc, etc....as Studiophiles like to claim...well, that's preposterous BS.
None of them have a clue "what the mix engineer heard" and all have serious delusions about "accuracy" of the reproduction, utter confusing their preference as anything but that.
Yes, I'm sure it satisfies his preference for reproduction. If only it were posited as such, instead of that crap about "accuracy" and "what the mix engineer heard", etc.
Quite so. Those Mackies have decent off axis. So I wonder what would happen if Toole subjected Ethan to an actual controlled (rather than his sighted biased experiences) test of that very room with and without the band aids. Would he still prefer them?
Of course, as I have stated previously, who listens blind at home? I don't....

cheers,

AJ

AJ hopefully your post will help xmia out. The things being said would throw off a newbie. Ethan did need to make clear to the original poster that he was stating his preference not reference.

reference in audio would be very hard to replicate if there really was such a thing.

Ethan im guessing that your screen is calibrated also?

I hope it helps out everyone reading this stuff. Unfortunately we both know better.
It clearly confuses the oldies too .
Indeed, or at least until we have those holodecks.
Until then we just have the wild imaginations of the studiophiles...aka..preferences. Which I enjoy!!

cheers,

AJ

My room (and most rooms NYC) has a layout similar to yours. Not only do we have a rear wall to deal with, we have a sidewall and little room for subs. To help with this situation, I've added a 2x4 fiberboard behind the sofa, in the corner, and one the wall. I also moved the sofa up about 10" from the rear wall. Good luck.

I'm still trying to figure that out. Currently, they 5feet 5 inches off the ground behind the sofa. I have bi-pol's, which isn't the best Idea considering the left wall. That's why I have fiberboard there.

Practical considerations prevent me from making everything ideal. If the front speakers were any higher they'd block the TV and projection screen. But they're only a little below ear height. And at ten feet away the sound spreads upward enough to still be mostly "on axis." In a near field setup with the speakers only three or four feet away, having them higher would be more important. As for the rear speakers angles, that too is impossible because there's a doorway at the ideal location. So I'm not the only person in this forum who has to compromise a bit to accommodate what cannot be changed! However, in the grand scheme of things, it all sounds excellent.

--Ethan

No, and it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to do that. I'm just too cheap to hire someone with the right gear. My friend, video expert Mark Weiss, "calibrated" both my 65-inch Mitsubishi RPTV (behind the screen) and my newer Mitsubishi projector by eye, and it looks very good on most sources. I do have a small issue with very bright whites clipping occasionally, so I plan to lower the gamma, which we set pretty high, when I get around to it soon.

--Ethan

ethan until i saw the pic of your room I assumed you had speakers setup exactly how that grammy article suggested. From all your post in here thats what most everyone probably thought. I pictured you sitting in one chair in small room with speakers just like studio lol wow you have to watch how you say things or people will get wrong idea happens to me alot

I picture Studiophiles and their "critical listening of what the mix engineer intended" treated rooms more like this:

But as Ethan has show, clearly this isn't always the case.
Now if someone else is ok with the aesthetics of a bunch of mattresses on their ceiling, who am I to disagree? I personally wouldn't want that, but to each their own.

cheers,

AJ

Let's try to be intellectual and impersonal about this. ;-)

The general question I see is whether or not mix engineer preference for monitoring equipment for mixing have any generalizable properties associated with them.

Since I've been known to do a little mixing, and have studied this issue since those JBL L100 ads in the 70s...

Based on 4 decades of study of other people's work and my own work, I conclude, yes mix engineer preferences for monitoring equipment for mixing do have generalizable properties.

I see them implemented in Ethan's listening room, as shown by photographs in this thread.

Ask me nicely, and I might even tell you what I think they are! ;-)

I think you need to take in account who the them are. If you are talking your average audiophile or high end magazine reader, then I agree with you.

If you are talking about guys who actually do mix day in and day out... it might be a different story!

I don't know why you feel the need to denigrate my company's products by referring to them as "mattresses." None the less, I understand that, like you, some people are more concerned about appearance than sound quality. And that's fine. I happen to care more about sound quality, and don't have a problem with the look of acoustic treatment.

This brings up Ethan's rule for acoustic treatment: You can have:

Effective
Attractive
Affordable

Pick any two.

Effective acoustic treatment can be hidden behind false fabric walls, so you can have both. But it costs a lot more to do that.

--Ethan

Lighten up Francis, it was said half in jest. I clearly prefaced it as what a layperson might see. You and I both know they aren't mattresses (I hope!) .
http://www.stereophile.com/content/soundfield-audio Yeah, clearly it's all about the looks with me .
Or maybe, maybe, I know a little something about producing sound in a domestic living room type environment that the majority of the listening population will enjoy, without resorting to the padded cell look...not that there is anything wrong with that look for audiophiles and especially, studiophiles. To the contrary, I find it quite fitting.
My method having been fleshed out by the repeatable science of controlled testing, yours by pure anecdote and the sighted whims of a tiny fringe element of society - Studiophiles.
Well, you stick with your method, I'll stick with mine...and we'll see what the marketplace determines. As always.
Clearly based on audio sites, you are at an advantage, as the intellect required to comprehend even the basics of what Toole et al have found, is way beyond those who would rather their room look like something in an isolation ward. But that's ok..

cheers,

AJ

End users Arny, end users. Including folks like Ethan, who would have no clue "what the mix engineer heard" on 99% of media owned by 99% of end users. Nor would he be able to recreate that soundfield "accurately" in his room, unless it is indeed a holodeck. The whole idea is a fools errand, given what we know about standardization of recorded media.

cheers,

AJ

Circular argument and willful elimination of relevant comments noted.

Obviously, AJ you have no cogent reply to the point I was trying to make, that you edited out.

That's ok Arny, you're wandering the neighborhood aimlessly again, so let me lead you home. Ok, start there, read slowly, do your best to follow the arguments and then when you start wandering aimlessly again, I'll come get you and put you back on track.

cheers,

AJ