Quote:
Originally Posted by 1KW
Robert stopped by for a visit today armed with his tripod, laser measurer, blue tape and I got out the Get Better Sound book by Jim Smith. Robert thanks for your help today, the speaker placement is much better and the sound is improved. I will let Robert tell what he did.
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Well, I'll never be confused for a "speaker whisperer"...in fact, I could scream at the things and I don't think they'd even hear me, but I digress.
Graciously,
David allowed me to entertain myself, today, with his beautiful system. Initially, we spent some time listening to his new turntable with the Shelter cartridge, and I was very impressed with the musicality of the system...not to mention the great looks of his Michell. This is the second time that I've been to his place, and I find his system very involving. It is warmer than my currently very sterile listening environment, and it completely draws me into the music. A very, very enjoyable experience which makes listening a true pleasure. As a side benefit of spinning some of his albums, I took note of a couple that I need to add to my shopping list.
Once we got through some listening, it was time to turn our attention to speaker placement. I'm totally a trial and error guy with a tin ear, so I guess that you could say that my goal for the day was to set a location from which further tweaking could be done, if desired. The Elipsas appeared to be slightly off center relative to the listening position, and also with slightly different toe. Some quick measurements confirmed this...love my new laser measurer...nothing like 1/32" accuracy!
Since I don't really know how Elipsas like to play relative to toe-in in David's room, I simply decided to pick a point about 24" behind the seating position to use as the "crossfire" point. Using some basics from
Get Better Sound, we created a centerline, got the speakers equally positioned on either side, and then equally positioned to the focal point. Once we had the bottom distance set and both speakers square to the focal point, we adjusted the rake to make sure that the tweeters were equidistant from the listening position (Initially, they were off by about 3/4" even though the bottoms of the speakers were at the same distance). At this point, our ratio of tweeter to tweeter vs. tweeter to ear was approximately 0.80...which falls within the range referenced in
GBS. After some listening tests, we didn't feel as though we were getting the soundstage width that we know is possible, but, unfortunately, time did not permit for further tinkering. So while we surely made some progress from where we started, we didn't hit a home run.
I enjoyed myself...and I thank David for allowing me to help him work on his beautiful system. One last note...I also came away thankful for the fact that my new Sophias are still on wheels which makes this whole positioning experiment much more pleasant!
