Article: My New Speakers Have Arrived!

[The Computer Audiophile]

12 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

"absorption and diffusion" is the key

 

maybe say:  it would be easier to get them to sound better in a bigger room

 

The thing with my room is that nobody has any clue until they are here. It isn’t a symmetrical space or even a space that’s a square, rectangle, or L shape etc...

 

Everybody I’ve talked to (acoustic engineers) has said all bets are off because of the shape of the room. Meaning, none of them can predict the sound like they can with a standard shape. 

 

After the final setup I will post measurements and have my measurements below all my reviews. 

[HIFI]

23 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

The thing with my room is that nobody has any clue until they are here. It isn’t a symmetrical space or even a space that’s a square, rectangle, or L shape etc...

 

Everybody I’ve talked to (acoustic engineers) has said all bets are off because of the shape of the room. Meaning, none of them can predict the sound like they can with a standard shape. 

 

After the final setup I will post measurements and have my measurements below all my reviews. 

Are your walls (front/back & left side/right side) parallel?

[rando]

Spitballing here.

 

Rev. 1 to office space remodel is greenlit after discovering an unforeseeable physical component vital to occupant's livelihood is dependent on ability to reclaim a void space.  Temporarily, with failsafes implemented to offset any and all safety related measures impacted (which would remain in place under normal conditions). 

 

Have to admit this would be a last resort for most.  At this point I'm reasonably confident the schizophrenic room dimensions and too big speakers will overwhelm in a good way without making room to dance.  

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 minutes ago, rando said:

Spitballing here.

 

Rev. 1 to office space remodel is greenlit after discovering an unforeseeable physical component vital to occupant's livelihood is dependent on ability to reclaim a void space.  Temporarily, with failsafes implemented to offset any and all safety related measures impacted (which would remain in place under normal conditions). 

 

Have to admit this would be a last resort for most.  At this point I'm reasonably confident the schizophrenic room dimensions and too big speakers will overwhelm in a good way without making room to dance.  

Not quite sure I understood any of that including why the speakers are too big. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

4 minutes ago, HIFI said:

Are your walls (front/back & left side/right side) parallel?

Parts of them are parallel. The left vertical wall is shorter than the right, so the pitched part is longer on that side. Front and back are kind of parallel if I close the doors on the front wall. 

[rando]

Well, at least the speakers being too big was riffing off that, unwise and quite unfair. 😇, sentiment a few have gone across the grain baldly expressing.  I have no opinion on the matter, valid or invalid.

 

As for the rest.  My ideas are not directly relevant to your decision making.  Nor should they be.  Nothing is simple here and whether you realize it or not that asks a very enjoyable actively developing set of questions.  Oh so very important to you right now questions that are going to live on the internet for anyone else starting afresh to see solutions to when facing a similar space them self. 

 

Instinct is to want to remove your banister to float a chair and push the speakers where they should normally go.  Maybe even go back and smack whoever didn't build stairs outside the structure.  All bets are off if that would matter one nit in the finale.  Where safe money lies on (possibly) rejiggering acoustic panels and trusting when the assembled ears find joy.  

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

The thing with my room is that nobody has any clue until they are here. It isn’t a symmetrical space or even a space that’s a square, rectangle, or L shape etc...

 

Everybody I’ve talked to (acoustic engineers) has said all bets are off because of the shape of the room. Meaning, none of them can predict the sound like they can with a standard shape. 

 

After the final setup I will post measurements and have my measurements below all my reviews. 

 

Yes, I saw your room description early in the thread.  It is problematic.

[The Computer Audiophile]

11 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

Yes, I saw your room description early in the thread.  It is problematic.

It’s only problematic for using formulaic solutions. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

17 hours ago, Solstice380 said:

OK, enough about the toil and bling and such.  I’m sure you have fired them up by now so tell us how your first listen was! 😎

 

Man oh man I’m having fun tonight. Listening to songs again for the first time. It sounds fantastic. There’s a bass hump in a small band of the bottom end that I need to work on once I find the specific frequency. No measurements tonight though. Only fun. 

[STC]

What a wonderful opportunity. It would be great learning experience if you had made a binaural recording of your reference track at LP of the TAD and compare them with the subsequent recordings with Wilson and tuning progress. 

 

It it may not be useful for others but the recording would provide a reference to you and know where you were heading towards the perfection. You will have instantaneous AB comparison and can always revert to a particular setup based on  which one of them really sounded good to you despite what the measurement says. 

 

Just sharing my opinion. 

[firedog]

27 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

Man oh man I’m having fun tonight. Listening to songs again for the first time. It sounds fantastic. There’s a bass hump in a small band of the bottom end that I need to work on once I find the specific frequency. No measurements tonight though. Only fun. 

 

Great! I’m smiling for you now, and remembering the grin I couldn’t get off my face when I first setup the Kiis. That experience is pure audiophile fun.

27 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

There’s a bass hump in a small band of the bottom end that I need to work on once I find the specific frequency. No measurements tonight though. Only fun. 

 

Guessing the Wilson expert setup will at least improve this a bit. Once you do measurements, you’ll see just what the problem is. Then either more panels or some judiciously applied DSP (yes, I wrote that) will solve the problem. 

[rickca]

9 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Man oh man I’m having fun tonight.

It's great that all your careful planning is paying off.  I guess it only gets better from here.

[ednaz]

11 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Parts of them are parallel. The left vertical wall is shorter than the right, so the pitched part is longer on that side. Front and back are kind of parallel if I close the doors on the front wall. 

 

The asymmetry and angled ceiling do make it an interesting math engineering problem, which is why that's probably not the right approach. Our last place had multiple ceiling heights, from 12 feet to nearly 3 stories, with a "flying bridge" (open balcony hallway) across the back, with another 12 feet behind it.  Open one side, closed the other. First moved speakers around to get it to sound best as it was, then started with experimenting with absorption and diffusion. Found that a nice display of thick, heavy Tibetan and Indian rugs on the railing of the flying bridge, hanging down to cover the whole front, completely transformed the sound. (and was quite nice looking...) Everything else was tweaky.

 

The pitched ceilings aren't necessarily bad. The best sounding studio I've ever been in - the recording sessions sounded LOVELY when in the room - was Rudy Van Gelder's asymmetrical beamed wood pyramid. Good enough that the room was part of most albums recorded there. I've got a friend who's built out or refurbed recording studios, in search of that live sound. He did big movable walls initially, and found that asymmetrical spaces sounded better than symmetrical ones, and finished two studios by tweaking the walls so that there were no parallels. Hard to reverse engineer a pyramid ceiling, though.

[charlesphoto]

Crazy speakers! Enjoy! Be glad you have a dedicated listening room - aside from the cost, if I was to set these down in our living room there would be hell to pay. Plus they would clash with my wife's 13 foot long red leather sofa! 

[Ralf11]

15 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

It’s only problematic for using formulaic solutions. 

 

Your room is almost impossible to model (or maybe I should say infeasible as non-analytic models could be constructed - at some cost).  Secondly, it will be more time consuming to optimize than a simpler setup no matter the methodology.

 

Understand, I am not criticizing your room, house, or choice of living space.

[Superdad]

15 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

It’s only problematic for using formulaic solutions. 

 

 

Chris: I am curious (and I guess too lazy to search your earlier threads about your room): 

Did you ever setup your TAD speakers in your remodeled room? Or are the Wilsons the first speakers to play in that space?

If the latter, then wow you really have a double journey ahead of you--getting used to the character of your room AND learning about optimizing the Wilsons in that space.

Best of luck and much musical joy in either case.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, Superdad said:

 

 

Chris: I am curious (and I guess too lazy to search your earlier threads about your room): 

Did you ever setup your TAD speakers in your remodeled room? Or are the Wilsons the first speakers to play in that space?

If the latter, then wow you really have a double journey ahead of you--getting used to the character of your room AND learning about optimizing the Wilsons in that space.

Best of luck and much musical joy in either case.

I had the TADs in here for a while. 

[Dpod4]

Congrats on new speakers. I’ve been on a similar journey. I have cycled thru Magnepan 20.7, Magico S5, various Raidho speakers, etc. The speaker I have owned and kept is the TAD CR1 mkii. I had it listed for sale to downsize but this last week I received from Japan a Zanden 6000 amp. The two together create music on par with angels singing in heaven. Prior I found the TADs highly revealing but in a “must keep the volume low” to appreciate everything else they did well. The Zanden changed all that. Instantly the listening session became a spiritual experience. Like the one or two times in my life I have listened to music and was TRANSPORTED almost out of body lost in the music kind of way. I get the TADs now. I understand them. When placed and paired appropriately they sing. I hope you find this with your Wilson’s. Get lost in the music. 

[ednaz]

5 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

Your room is almost impossible to model (or maybe I should say infeasible as non-analytic models could be constructed - at some cost).  Secondly, it will be more time consuming to optimize than a simpler setup no matter the methodology.

 

I am not criticizing your room, house, or choice of living space.

 

You may have seen me say earlier that because a space is hard to model using traditional acoustic engineering tools, simply means you fall back to ear. I'm on patents based on formal verification (which includes the most nightmarish math I've ever hated), number theory, and algorithmically driven computer code translation. So I'm not afraid of the math... just very cognizant that sometimes the math can suck because it isn't founded on certain necessary conditions. A few times, the higher math breakthroughs came from real wizards (I'm a catalyst, not a wizard) listening to intuitive experts talk about how they do their work. Attempts to model analog insights.

Still, in memory of the anniversary of Apollo 11... we sent a few tons of metal gear and humans off the earth, sitting on top of extremely high explosive devices, and then landed two of them on the moon while their onboard computers (and that last word is very, very kind) spit multiple errors and rebooted every minute during the final approach. The analog computers that sit above our shoulders are amazing things. They fixed all the digital computer failures. Sit and grill some experts on super-computing, and they'll tell you that they'll all suck (by comparison to our brains) until they're based on analog computer technology.

 

There are new video technologies called "event cameras"... that are basically video sensors based on analog pixels. They can make nice normal videos. And can then view the same images at rates much higher than 5000 frames per second. 

 

Locating these speakers in this space will be easiest using analog computers based on meat. Bet you that we hear that what he learned optimizing the TAD speakers contributed in some way.

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 minutes ago, ednaz said:

Bet you that we hear that what he learned optimizing the TAD speakers contributed in some way.

Yes. Big time. 

[loop7]

I predict these may be a gateway drug to other Wilson models.

[HIFI]

20 hours ago, STC said:

What a wonderful opportunity. It would be great learning experience if you had made a binaural recording of your reference track at LP of the TAD and compare them with the subsequent recordings with Wilson and tuning progress. 

 

It it may not be useful for others but the recording would provide a reference to you and know where you were heading towards the perfection. You will have instantaneous AB comparison and can always revert to a particular setup based on  which one of them really sounded good to you despite what the measurement says. 

 

Just sharing my opinion. 

As I have followed I don’t remember the TAD’s in the new room optimized at any point as the path Chris is on now with Wilsons and room treatment . . . so not sure the value of the ab comparison.  

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

51 minutes ago, HIFI said:

As I have followed I don’t remember the TAD’s in the new room optimized at any point as the path Chris is on now with Wilsons and room treatment . . . so not sure the value of the ab comparison.  

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, loop7 said:

I predict these may be a gateway drug to other Wilson models.

 

I can’t say never, but the better models are all very large. I don’t have the height in my room for even the next model up, the Alexx. 

[rickca]

16 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

I can’t say never, but the better models are all very large. I don’t have the height in my room for even the next model up, the Alexx. 

The Alexia 2's should be able to raise the roof. 😊