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Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406679 08/19/14 11:26 AM
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axiomite
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Great! Now I'm going to have the Blues Brothers in my head all day.

I'm a pole man, DAda da, da DADA da da


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Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406746 08/23/14 04:21 PM
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axiomite
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Hmm... OK, so I moved the M60s from HT area down to the living room and worked over the living room acoustics to make a decent listening area for music. M40s moved from the music system back up to the HT area. I just paralleled M2s on top to make M42s, which sound pretty good even for music. That just led to a serious D'oh!! moment though...

My original reason for setting up a separate music system (some years back) was that my AV receiver didn't have a phono input and I didn't know about standalone phono preamps at the time.

Now that I know about phono preamps, and since I'm planning to move the office up to the loft (HT area), I guess a better plan might have been to fix up the acoustics in the HT area, pick up a phono preamp and run everything through the AVR instead.

Of course the HT area has its own acoustic challenges -- it's basically an attic arrangement where the ceiling angles at 45 degrees all the way to the floor, so there's a huge honkin' mode because the distance from floor to ceiling to opposite ceiling to floor is constant no matter where you start, and it has all the usual "speakers on the short wall" challenges too.

Not looking forward to starting the acoustics exercise again but it would be nice to have a useable-for-something-other-than-audio living room again too.

Improving the HT acoustics would also improve sound for movies, and having a 200WPC amp driving the mains couldn't hurt for those "crank it to 11, the helicopter's about to hit the building" moments. I also plan to get off my butt one day and flash the AVR firmware to properly support 7.1 and then use the M2s as rear surrounds, so I guess it all fits. Pity.



(this was a quick pic to show the new VP180, it's tidier now)

Last edited by bridgman; 08/23/14 04:43 PM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406747 08/23/14 04:25 PM
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John, if you're going through all these exercises in acoustics, doesn't it just make sense to get the M100s now, so you don't have to re-do everything? grin


::::::: No disrespect to Axiom, but my favorite woofer is my yellow lab :::::::
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406749 08/23/14 04:41 PM
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axiomite
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La la la la !!!!

(but yes it does)

Louder this time, with just a hint of desperation...

La la la la !!!!

Last edited by bridgman; 08/23/14 04:44 PM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406753 08/23/14 07:34 PM
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B
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The Vault is perfect for adding acoustic clouds, lots of room above and around them.

Do you have acoustic treatments in this room? Sorry if I missed it...

Last edited by brwsaw; 08/23/14 07:36 PM.


Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406755 08/23/14 09:29 PM
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No treatments in the HT area, although if pressed I might claim the rug in the picture is there as an acoustic treatment. I have a rough idea where the first reflection points are but need to measure carefully to find studs and haven't done that, so nothing mounted yet. The ceiling is framed with 2x12 joists covered by a few inches of rigid foam to get R40, but the foam + distance seems to confuse the stud finder.

Lots of treatments down in the living room, to the point where my friends now call it "the ugly room".

Last edited by bridgman; 08/23/14 09:30 PM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
brwsaw #406761 08/24/14 03:30 AM
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axiomite
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Originally Posted By: brwsaw
The Vault is perfect for adding acoustic clouds, lots of room above and around them.

I do have a vault (technically a gun room, I guess) in the basement but it has a low-ish ceiling and I was struggling to figure out where the cloud would go.

After some sleep my brain finally remembered that "The Vault" is "the pointy thing at the top of the room" smile

That's a great point -- I thought about adding treatments there for the living room but since it's ~20 feet up from the living room floor I wasn't really enthusiastic about it. Up in the loft the vault is only 10 feet off the floor which makes it an ideal area for treatment.

Last edited by bridgman; 08/24/14 03:36 AM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406865 08/28/14 05:15 PM
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OK, no more changes for a while. I've been missing the M60's from the HT system (the M42's just didn't sound the same, even with levels re-tweaked) and I was even eyeing a used pair of Revel F12's as a way to let me move the M60's back upstairs, free up the M2's for use as rear surrounds, and stop agonizing about spending $3-4K on new speakers for the music system.

Out of curiosity I moved the M40's back downstairs last night. With the bigger amp and improved room acoustics they now sound *really* good, and AFAICS they actually go a bit deeper than the M60's (although not as loud and a bit recessed in the midrange). Bass drum sounds deeper, I finally figured out what is so catchy about Kylie Minogue's "Can't get you out of my head" (there's a really deep bass pulse off-the-beat from the rest of the rhythm), and I can *finally* hear the really low notes in "On the run" from DSOTM crawling around under the floor.

My subs should have been able to reproduce those low notes from DSOTM but I guess the room & placement were never up to snuff. I think this is the first time I have ever heard "On the run" sound right on a system at home -- that's been a "megabuck demo room" experience only until now.

Last edited by bridgman; 08/28/14 05:58 PM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406867 08/28/14 07:52 PM
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The girls are gonna think you bin working out what with all the speaker moving. smile


DOG is GOD spelled backwards.
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M80 V3 MY GLOSS Cherry
Re: Stupid Room Tricks
bridgman #406905 08/30/14 08:13 PM
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axiomite
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Originally Posted By: Socketman
The girls are gonna think you bin working out what with all the speaker moving. smile

That's the plan. Carrying the M40s and M60s up and down the stairs every couple of days has to help a bit. If I was more motivated I guess I would rig a pulley arrangement so that the weight of the speakers I'm bringing down from the HT area offsets the weight of the speakers I'm carrying back up.

Rather than tilting the speakers back ~5 degrees (1x2 under the front feet) I tried raising them ~10 inches instead. I was surprised how much the midrange seemed to improve (presumably from being a bit less off-axis ?) and the soundstage seemed to increase in size vertically (which I don't understand at all).

On the downside I think the really deep bass I was enjoying was impacted a bit for the worse -- I can still hear the really low notes in On The Run but I don't seem to be able to hear them moving as much as I did with the speakers on. Could be placement nuance or different levels (wishing I had taken a picture of the volume control setting) but I experimented with both and didn't get the same results as before.

On the other hand the midrange improvements mean I'm now hearing phasing effects on a few songs (Heart's Mistral Wind and a Tangerine Dream song whose name I don't remember) which I previously only noticed on the M60s. Better midrange at the cost of cool deep bass, that's a choice I would rather not have to make. Ignoring the very deep bass, however, the M40s are now sounding closer to the M60s in the midrange than they ever have before, enough to make me wonder if the M40s would have been loved more if they had been a few inches taller.

As usual no expense was spared and only the finest materials were used when constructing the speaker stands. I might replace them with something solid after a bit more testing:


Last edited by bridgman; 08/30/14 08:42 PM.

M60ti, VP180, QS8, M2ti, EP500, PC-Plus 20-39
M5HP, M40ti, Sierra-1
LFR1100 active, ADA1500-4 and -8
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