Small listening rooms. How do YOU deal with them?

fiddlefye

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In the process of reorganizing the house here my study/studio/listening room moved to am odd little 11' x 11' bedroom upstairs. Not to worry, there was a fair exchange in that I took over the living room as primarily a teaching space for violin lessons. I tried all sorts of speaker placement and they all sounded pretty horrendous until I placed them in one corner with an alcove about 4' deep behind them. Even without doing anything special for room treatment the sound is working out really well. Initially I was pretty bummed about what I was hearing and concerned. I'm sure if had the means to run some measurements I'd find a problem of some sort, but just by ear I'm really happy so far.

I'm sure other folks have their systems in smaller spaces. What issues have you encountered and how have you overcome them?
 
The alcove on the front wall seems to be a great acoustic feature and many report favorable results when setting up as you have. If you like what you're hearing then that's a great start. But be aware, the likelihood that you're catching a number of early reflections at the listening position is very high. I'm a glass half full kind of guy, so to me this is a good thing as if you like the way things sound now you're really going to be pleased if you elect to address those reflections.
 
tomlinmgt;n3038 said:
The alcove on the front wall seems to be a great acoustic feature and many report favorable results when setting up as you have. If you like what you're hearing then that's a great start. But be aware, the likelihood that you're catching a number of early reflections at the listening position is very high. I'm a glass half full kind of guy, so to me this is a good thing as if you like the way things sound now you're really going to be pleased if you elect to address those reflections.

I'm sure once I get everything settled, the gear where I want it etc. I'll start to get pickier. I also am expecting that if I really push the volume envelope any issues will rear their ugly heads a bit more, but I have had it fairly loud (as much as I'm comfortable with) and I'm not hearing a lot of monkey business like I did with the other placements. As it is I have one of my wife's decorative quilts on the wall and there will likely be a second later and they have to help. The imaging is quite concise, tall and deep so it can't be too bad as a starting point. I'm curious what effect the area behind the speakers has as it stands. I have a dresser stuffed in there (full), but the upper level is open to the windows, but with curtains. Heavier and longer curtains are in the works eventually.
 
I once had my system set up in an 11 x 12 room and ended up fitting my big Altecs in there (!), so developed a bit of a methodology on getting something reasonable.

I started by getting everything out of there that wasn't necessary and it turned out, that was a lot. I got down to the stereo, a coffee table, end-table (that doubled as some record storage), a lamp, clock radio and a pull-out futon (yes, it was also a bedroom) that's it. The cloths I used regularly all went into the closet on a shelving system, anything occasionally used and all the computer stuff went into another room only a laptop remained.

I listened and messed a lot with system and speaker placement (Coincident Triumph sigs on stands) and it was better, but still pretty bad. Luckily, the main problem was a room that was way too ‘live' (drywall, 2 windows, 1 door, a huge ‘mirror' faced closet and hardwood floor) so I put in an area run and considered my move to absorption panels targeted at mid into high frequencies. Pretty close to a square room which is bad for bass node problems but I was renting so I'd just have to live with that.

I lucked into some old office partition panels that they were replacing at work and these ended up being the best ‘system' component I'd ever added. They were real heavy (HDF core) with rock-wool on both surfaces, burlap wrapped and decent looking oak edges, even had plastic ‘ footers' that allowed them to slide very easily in front of that class faced closet and one of the windows when really listening.

The sound in there improved dramatically with these panels and I had enough of them that I experimented with several until I found a nice balance. The final piece that was really a shocker was a speaker upgrade those big-ass 9 cu.ft. Altecs stuffed in the corners actually gave me more usable space in that room than those monitors on stands and I feel the point-source design worked considerable better when sitting that close to them in there.

So it was purge the stuff, less-is-more, get a feel for the room straight-up, carefully tune to taste, then experiment with tweaking the system as icing on the cake even something as dramatic as a completely different type of speaker. There is certainly a more scientific way to do this and it's probably more effective but hack and taste worked pretty well - considering the limitations of a 'temporary' space.
 
I find myself wondering what the reflectance of certain items (like LPs and books on shelves) commonly found in listening rooms might actually be. Intuition tells me that any waveform that runs into something like a row of LP spines will end up pretty broken up, but what do I know? Anyone know of a list?

In spite of having done absolutely no treatment in my little study/studio room I'm pretty chuffed with the results so far. Sure it could be better (and undoubtedly will be), but so far it is a very nice sounding space. In the end there will only so much I can do to tune it as it is and always will be a multi-purpose room. I've been looking for information on setting up a small, square space with speakers in the corner and haven't found much so far, yet from my little experience it is vastly better than any other alternative I tried (all of which were really, really bad).
 
Every acoustical engineer I've ever spoken to agrees that books on shelves and LP/jewel case spines actually don't diffuse sonic energy like most assume. You can pretty much count on them being a hard reflection that gets scattered somewhat, but not nearly enough to be properly diffuse. To really break up the sonic energy there needs to be a pretty significant depth delta between adjacent surfaces. Purpose built diffusion devices establish what these values should be based on complex calculations with the end result being a controlled, predictable diffusion of the sonic energy in both the time and spectral domains. Now, whether or not you're catching an early reflection from books/cd and/or LP spines depends on a few variables, but dismissing that they could be creating issues just because they're not a perfectly flat, hard surface would be a false assumption.

Honestly, the recipe for treating a small room is the same as any space....tame early reflections first. Use the mirror method to find the first reflection locations on the side walls and perhaps start considering a non-permanent absorption panel installation if those locations are occupied by shelves or whatnot.
 
tomlinmgt;n5871 said:
Every acoustical engineer I've ever spoken to agrees that books on shelves and LP/jewel case spines actually don't diffuse sonic energy like most assume. You can pretty much count on them being a hard reflection that gets scattered somewhat, but not nearly enough to be properly diffuse. To really break up the sonic energy there needs to be a pretty significant depth delta between adjacent surfaces. Purpose built diffusion devices establish what these values should be based on complex calculations with the end result being a controlled, predictable diffusion of the sonic energy in both the time and spectral domains. Now, whether or not you're catching an early reflection from books/cd and/or LP spines depends on a few variables, but dismissing that they could be creating issues just because they're not a perfectly flat, hard surface would be a false assumption.

Honestly, the recipe for treating a small room is the same as any space....tame early reflections first. Use the mirror method to find the first reflection locations on the side walls and perhaps start considering a non-permanent absorption panel installation if those locations are occupied by shelves or whatnot.

I obviously need to do considerably more pondering on what goes on in my space, but from an "eyeball" perspective it seems like any reflections from the two (angled) sides would meet at a spot considerably behind my listening location. Any reflection would therefore be off the back wall and still again at an angle. Sort of like shooting pool up to a point, isn't it?
 
Angled? So the room is not square? The side walls are non parallel surfaces?

Yes, it's exactly like shooting pool. You'll have an incident angle from the speaker to the wall and and a reflected angle from the wall to the listening positon. A mirror will show you where the shortest vector is located.
 
tomlinmgt;n5925 said:
Angled? So the room is not square? The side walls are non parallel surfaces?

Yes, it's exactly like shooting pool. You'll have an incident angle from the speaker to the wall and and a reflected angle from the wall to the listening positon. A mirror will show you where the shortest vector is located.

The room is square, but the speakers are in one corner and my listening position is about 1/3 of the way out from the opposite corner of the room. There is a big recess in the speaker corner with the speakers located in front of the outer edges of the opening. The speakers (monitors on Target stands) end up being about 3 feet out from the back of the recess. The speakers are abut 5 feet apart and my listening position is in an equilateral triangle with them almost perfectly. I end up with the wall behind me being about 4 feet away and the corner (with a door that is usually left open) about 6 feet back.

I will try to draw up a little diagram with measurements later, will scan it and post it as I suspect my blathering is a bit confusing!
 
Looks like I will be making some changes around here which means moving my office back into the middle bedroom and converting my previous listening and vinyl record room back into my listening room which measures 12x14. It will be a little tight since my collection of vinyl takes up several Ikea Expedit storage units and all of my photography books.
 
As I posted earlier, I'm reconfiguring my home office into a combination office/listening room #2.

That room is right around 12x14 give or take and will house my desk on one short wall and the Quad ESL-57s on the other short wall.

Looking forward to seeing your progress. :)
 
fiddlefye;n5927 said:
The room is square, but the speakers are in one corner and my listening position is about 1/3 of the way out from the opposite corner of the room. There is a big recess in the speaker corner with the speakers located in front of the outer edges of the opening. The speakers (monitors on Target stands) end up being about 3 feet out from the back of the recess. The speakers are abut 5 feet apart and my listening position is in an equilateral triangle with them almost perfectly. I end up with the wall behind me being about 4 feet away and the corner (with a door that is usually left open) about 6 feet back.

I will try to draw up a little diagram with measurements later, will scan it and post it as I suspect my blathering is a bit confusing!

Ahhh....I see now. I just reread your OP and see that you said you're setting the speakers up in ONE corner. I missed that earlier and just thought you were saying because the space is so small you have the speakers shoved deep into the corners. But what you're doing is setting up on the diagonal....got it! Ok, this is good! Setting up on a diagonal will indeed minimize early reflections and Decware has written a paper that discusses this...

http://www.decware.com/paper14.htm

I should probably add that to the room acoustics reference thread.
 
tomlinmgt;n5950 said:
Ahhh....I see now. I just reread your OP and see that you said you're setting the speakers up in ONE corner. I missed that earlier and just thought you were saying because the space is so small you have the speakers shoved deep into the corners. But what you're doing is setting up on the diagonal....got it! Ok, this is good! Setting up on a diagonal will indeed minimize early reflections and Decware has written a paper that discusses this...

http://www.decware.com/paper14.htm

I should probably add that to the room acoustics reference thread.

Somehow it is working really nicely out of the box (or rather in it, so to speak). I tried some set ups on one wall or the other and they all sounded terrible. Then I ditched a long table I was planning on using for my computer set up and went with a desk and things finally came into some focus. As it stands now I have really balanced, strong and clear bass and nice sound stage. Because I sit so far into the room (turn my chair around in front of the desk for serious listening) the only possible reflections I could get are off the back of the speakers from the alcove and off the wall behind me. That wall is of course at 45 degree-ish to the waveform from the speakers already. The system sounds miraculously good with my back to it when I'm actually on the computer as well, though of course imaging is a bit.... odd. A bit like sitting in a jazz club and being the guy who has to sit with his back to the band (listening to some live jazz as I type).

I'm quite sure I can improve the acoustics over time, but the corner placement of the speakers, the space behind them being just about exactly what the manufacturer advises (Reference 3a) and the chair being out in the room helps as well. I think I'm starting off from a position of real strength in what I was afraid would be a really tough space to manage.

On a related topic, my other two principal listening rooms are similarly remarkably without native issues. My last house nothing worked well, this old place just seems to like audio a lot better. One can always improve, mind you!
 
tomlinmgt;n5950 said:
Ahhh....I see now. I just reread your OP and see that you said you're setting the speakers up in ONE corner. I missed that earlier and just thought you were saying because the space is so small you have the speakers shoved deep into the corners. But what you're doing is setting up on the diagonal....got it! Ok, this is good! Setting up on a diagonal will indeed minimize early reflections and Decware has written a paper that discusses this...

http://www.decware.com/paper14.htm

I should probably add that to the room acoustics reference thread.

This is what I did for years in a 12' x 13' room, after I read that Decware article. I found it sounded best that way.
 
David #13. I found the number of panels needed in the room depends also how large your speakers. My bookshelves sounded a little muted on the low freqs and the moment i removed 2panels from the rear wall, it liven up right away. My room's about 12x13.
 
^^^
Yep...gotta be careful you don't reduce reverb in the room too much.

Kill all the early reflections then add additional absorption/diffusion to taste.
 
tomlinmgt;n6776 said:
^^^
Yep...gotta be careful you don't reduce reverb in the room too much.

Kill all the early reflections then add additional absorption/diffusion to taste.

True. I don't think it is a good thing to absorb so much that you effectively take the room our of the equation. Remove the nasties and create a space that gives a realistic sound. One of the hard things to accomplish in a small space is to create a sense of scale like the room is bigger than it really is. I'd be curious what it is that gives us cues that read that way?
 
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