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Infinity R152 in room response, compression, distortion

3K views 14 replies 6 participants last post by  bear123 
#1 ·
I have an inexpensive, mostly repurposed music system in my basement workout room. Although there is surely much room for improvement, the sound is far better than I need it for listening to music while training. It consists of:
Yamaha RXV-375 AVR. This was my first AVR, maybe $220 brand new? HDMI video switching barely works, but I'm using an old computer monitor that does not use HDMI so problem solved.
Apple TV for streaming. Have since upgraded to 4K ATV so this was also just leftover
JBL550P sub. Got this somewhat for free on trade when I sold off some 18" subs as the owner had no use for it.
Infinity R152. Really the only thing I spent money for other than the wall mounts. $129 on sale.

Anyway, I was curious as to how my in room response looked with these super cheap speakers and no room correction or eq applied. Also, I made no attempt to move about the room looking for any kind of optimal response. Just plopped my Umik-1 down about 9' away on the seat of my Schwinne Airdyne(aka Satan). I did compression sweeps to check response, output, extension, and distortion:
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By the time I got to -10 running full range, the little 5" woofers were complaining quite a bit, so I put in a crossover for the top couple of sweeps in order to see how things looked out past 3-500 Hz. I have found small, single woofer speakers hit their limits much sooner below 300 Hz. And remember, this is without room correction eq, which easily eats up 3-6 dB of headroom in this area.

As you can see, the two highest sweeps still look pretty good out past 300 Hz.
 
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Discussion starter · #2 ·
OK, here is a distortion measurement on the highest level sweep shown:
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Out past 500 Hz, distortion looks quite good mostly below 1-2% other than a spike to 5% which is likely around crossover. As I've noticed in bookshelf speakers especially, distortion has risen to 20% by 300 Hz and under, even with an 80Hz crossover in place. This is very clearly audible and does not sound good at all on a sweep. Keep in mind that this is no eq, which means we would easily have the same distortion levels even at 5 dB+ lower volume once eq is applied. This is why I am a big proponent for tower speakers with larger, multiple woofers unless listening levels are modest. This is a tough range for speakers even when crossed to subs.
 
Discussion starter · #3 ·
Here's a shot of the room to give an idea of the setup. The speaker I tested(LEFT) is a couple inches from the wall, and somewhat close to the corner. So should be getting almost maximum boundary reinforcement in the lower frequencies. Mic was on the bike seat.
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Discussion starter · #4 ·
Let's find out where distortion starts to become an issue:
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Here we see distortion is below 5% above 300 Hz, and below 1% above 500 Hz, other than a spike to 2.5% around crossover. Below 300 Hz, we spike to 10% and higher. These sweeps also sounded noticeably distressed down low due to these distortion levels. We are about 10dB below reference at the SPL of this sweep.
 
Discussion starter · #5 ·
Ok, lets drop the volume down until distortion becomes negligible:
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Distortion here exceeds 5% below 100 Hz. This would probably be reasonably good with an 80 Hz crossover if eq were not in use. Below 1% over 500 Hz, and under the noise floor above 700 Hz(haha still peaking up just a bit at crossover)
 
Discussion starter · #6 ·
Next lower sweep corresponding to the -15 MV sweep seen above in the compression graph:
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Distortion barely crosses 2% down to as low as 100 Hz, under 1% above 400 Hz.
And finally at around the -20 MV sweep:
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Discussion starter · #7 ·
Since the -15 MV sweep level looks pretty clean even when running full range, here is the SPL for that sweep:
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If room correction were to flatten out some of the excess energy below 300 Hz, some additional headroom would likely be gained prior to eq. So at this listening distance in this room with lots of boundary reinforcement, this speaker would be quite solid up to 90 dB or so, or 15 dB below reference level. This is with a sine wave, so on real content maybe we can expect a few more dB of real world performance.

Just measured distance at 11'.
 
Discussion starter · #9 · (Edited)
Nice! I'm considering a new desk setup with a pair of relatively inexpensive bookshelf speakers and a small sub. I've heard the R152 punches well above it's MSRP and it sure looks like it does.

Any thoughts on how these would sound with near field use? 1 meter from each speaker max.

I'm also looking at the KEF Q150.
Not sure about how they'd sound nearfield. I wonder if close woofer/tweeter spacing is important for closer listening distances? Maybe others are running this way can comment.

One thing I'll say, is that I'm not sure if these would be small enough for a desktop. They aren't super wide but fairly deep.

Emotiva B1+ might be another to look at that might be a bit smaller if that matters.
 
Discussion starter · #11 ·
As for subs, here's the JBL550P. I need to move it around a bit…when listening a bit more carefully today, the sound was a little boomier than I'm used to. No eq on sub or speakers so plenty of peaks:
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I'd like to see if I can flatten the response out a bit by moving the sub around some. What makes it tough though is that I don't have an MLP as I move about the room quite a bit. So it will be hard to say if smoothing the response in one place will make things any better or worse in all the other places in the room. So it's probably more trouble than its worth. And not like I'm doing critical listening doing squats, bench and deadlifting haha.

Edit: the +5, +10 labels do not signify MV level, but rather just the level incease from sweep to sweep. I started very low, maybe -40? Not sure.
 
Discussion starter · #15 ·
As far as the 162/152, I grabbed the 152's with the intention of them being a temporary place holder to use in place of my towers. Was going to sell them and use the 152's and JBL sub(a pair) until after we moved since no idea how my current gear will fit in whatever new place we end up in. Anti WAF put an end to that idea. Towers and large ported 15" dual subs aren't going anywhere on her watch. :ROFLMAO:

Just for fun, I might check response at a couple more locations to see if there is a general trend throughout the room that a bit of eq might help. Yamaha's room correction in my old RXV-375 hasn't done much to correct response previously, but it does have manual eq filters I can try using, at least on the speakers. It's a low priority though so not sure if/when I'll get around to it.
 
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