La Scala Room

[wallydog]

Can anyone offer advice on speaker layout for my new room? I am using a pair of La Scala's, an RC-7, and a pair of RS-7's. The roomwill be 12' to 14' wide and 13' to 14' deep with an 8"6" ceiling. The floor will be carpeted concrete and the walls carpeted.

Please help!

[artto]

It's probably too "late" to ideally optimize anything. Before worring about speaker placement, room size and proprtions really need to be considered first as this will affect the low frequency performance of how the speaker interacts with the room.

Your room is somewhat squarish (not really a good thing), and certainly on the small side for speakers of that size and type.

Also, I think you will find that as you go through any optimization process, eventually you'll come to the conclusion that with some recordings/sources things sound better with the speakers and/or listening position in different locations.

You can see my thread further down in the Architectural section for plenty of info. You can also Google "room modes" for more detailed info amd mode calculators.

[garyrc]

Can anyone offer advice on speaker layout for my new room? I am using a pair of La Scala's, an RC-7, and a pair of RS-7's. The roomwill be 12' to 14' wide and 13' to 14' deep with an 8"6" ceiling. The floor will be carpeted concrete and the walls carpeted.

Please help!

• You should get away from the nearly square floor plan. If you haven't set the final dimentions yet, and you are limited to the range of dimentions in your post, I suspect that 12 x 14 would be a good choice, given the limitations. Anything perfectly square, such as 13 x 13 or 14 x 14 would be undesireable. Paul W. Klipsch once listed 1.26:1 as the minimum ratio for L to W, with greater ratios generally being better.
• Carpeted walls might make the room too "dead." A variety of different surfaces and furnishings to diffuse the sound is usually recommended. Have someone move a mirror along the side walls (flat against the walls) and mark the point(s) at which you can see the reflection of any speaker from your favorite listening chairs. Those marked spots should get a small area of absorbtion using something like Sonex, or glass wool (insulation) with an acoustically transparent fabric cover. If you had a bigger room, someone might recommend diffusion at those points, but your room is probably too smalll to allow for the space diffusers need to work (?).
• The higher than average ceiling may be a good thing

[wallydog]

Ok. I turned the room and removed a wall and now have a room that's 13x28 with various wall finishes. Better?

[garyrc]

Ok. I turned the room and removed a wall and now have a room that's 13x28 with various wall finishes. Better?

The larger size and the various wall finishes are an improvement. It's
possible that 28' is too close to twice 13' .... run a room mode
calculator (available online ... who can give him a link?) on your
dimensions. Another approach is to see how the dimensions work out when
plugged into Bolt's contour, although I've rarely found a real room in a
house that passes this test (usually the ceiling is not high enough). Bolt's contour is available in Klipsch's Dope from Hope -- the Dope from Hope is somewhere on this forum, so the search function should make it pop up.
As many will point out, it's not so much a quest for magic dimensions as
it is running the room modes and making sure they don't clump up too
badly. That's for the bass and lower midrange (below about 350 Hz?).
For the middle & upper midrange and treble, in addition to your
various wall finishes, you might want many objects of various shapes
(vases, artifacts, books ... or DIY diffusers) to break up reflections
without deadening the room. Commercial diffusers are very expensive.
If the room turns out to be too live, you can always deaden it a bit, but if
it is too dead, it is generally too dead.

Do you have La Scalas or La Scala IIs? The original La Scala would be likely to benefit greatly from "first reflection points" absorbtion ... but don't overdo. The Heritage line doesn't like dead rooms, IMO

[garyrc]

Ok. I turned the room and removed a wall and now have a room that's 13x28 with various wall finishes. Better?

The larger size and the various wall finishes are an improvement. It's
possible that 28' is too close to twice 13' .... run a room mode
calculator (available online ... who can give him a link?) on your
dimensions. Another approach is to see how the dimensions work out when
plugged into Bolt's contour, although I've rarely found a real room in a
house that passes this test (usually the ceiling is not high enough). Bolt's contour is available in Klipsch's Dope for Hope -- the Dope from Hope is somewhere on this forum, so the search function should make it pop up.
As many will point out, it's not so much a quest for magic dimensions as
it is running the room modes and making sure they don't clump up too
badly. That's for the bass and lower midrange (below about 350 Hz?).
For the middle & upper midrange and treble, in addition to your
various wall finishes, you might want many objects of various shapes
(vases, artifacts, books ... or DIY diffusers) to break up reflections
without deadening the room. Commercial diffusers are very expensive.
If the room turns out to be too live, you can always deaden it a bit, but if
it is too dead, it is generally too dead.

[artto]

Ok. I turned the room and removed a wall and now have a room that's 13x28 with various wall finishes. Better?

No. The room is then long and narrow. This would probably be a good thing, IF ceiling were much higher, and the general room size were much larger. The best sounding concert halls in the world have that sort of "shoebox" proportions but they generally seat about 2000. In this size room you're probably going to get some pretty nasty resonances/modal interferences in the bass range ~ some tones will be "amplified" while others will be cancelled almost entirely.

And some food for thought. The first room dimensions you gave, considering its size. don't you think a pair of LaScala and a pair of RF7 are a little overkill? It's kind of like trying to drop an Allison aircraft engine into a VW Beetle.

But, as I've always said ~ "to each his own"

[wallydog]

Some people like to go really really fast! Ok. I was too small and now I'm too large. Can you recommend a size to aim for? Can you tell me about your room? Also to note the la scalas are 1980's era and the reference series speakers are late 90's or early 2000s. I am using them because that's what I own and I've always loved their sound. Thanks!

!&

[garyrc]

Some people like to go really really fast! Ok. I was too small and now I'm too large. Can you recommend a size to aim for? Can you tell me about your room? Also to note the la scalas are 1980's era and the reference series speakers are late 90's or early 2000s. I am using them because that's what I own and I've always loved their sound. Thanks!
!&

[i'm not sure where all the underlines in the following post came from ... I only asked for the first ones (in the first line: "not" & "unfavorable shape") .. Oh, well.]

IMO it is not that your room is "too large" now, it's just that it may be an unfavorable shape.
As Artto suggested, Google "room modes," or perhaps "room proportions
for good audio." Since you are constructing your room, run any proposed
proportions through a room mode calculator. The old PWK article in the
Dope from Hope discusses several shapes. Most of these devices, from
Bolt to mode calculators, take the ceiling height into account, but if
you are just looking at the floor plan, avoid 1:1, 2:1, or any other
exact or close to exact multiple. The best room I ever had was 1.6:1. Read a least 2 or 3 articles on the
subject..

It is also a good idea to make the walls very firm.
Most people use 2 x 6 studs 16" on center, sometimes with 3/4 plywood
under whatever your walls are made of. If it is sheetrock, stagger the
seams of the sheetrock and the plywood.

You are fortunate to be
building your room from scratch. Most people are stuck with an existing
room which they try to fix with all sorts of expensive absorbers,
diffusers, bass traps, etc. Not to say that these devices don't work at
all ... The Boarding House in San Francisco was a long narrow room that
should have sounded terrible due to reflections that would interfere
with a smooth and pleasant reverberant tail (although the narrow
dimension was so wide that the frequency range of the first modes would
have been below the fundamentals in music, so didn't have as extreme of a
mode problem as a small room that shape in a home would have). It
actually sounded pretty good, whether the sound was live or reproduced
through their speakers. I attribute this to what must have been one of
the world's largest broadband membrane absorbers/reflectors, a solid
triangular hardwood device, mounted on the wall, running almost the
length of the very long room. It provided significant
non-parallelism, absorption, and diffusion.

[JohnA]

No interger multiples of any wall vs any other. Not even close if the walls are parallel.

Build a trapezoidal shaped room from the 28 x 13, front/scteen/mains in the narrow end, seats in the wide end.

My room is about 14 x 16 x 19 x 21. The right wall, facing the front, is set at a 100 deg. angle from the front wall. The back walls have a few "features" built into it to hide columns, but they also seem to act as diffusers. Otherwise, they are painted sheetrock. With a padded, heavy berber carpet , plus acoustic tile ceiling and heavy recliners, the room is very "dead". A hand clap reveals little reverberation. That's desireable as your surround system will supply the intended nreverberation.

You can make the walls stiff with 2 levels of block-bridging between each 2 x 4 and with 2 layers of sheetrock/paneling/plywood on EACH side. Use screws. There is not much point in gluing sheetrock to the studs, but you can glue each layer of sheetrock together and gluing plywood or paneling to the studs will ensure the parts work as a whole unit.

You have room to angle both walls, but the 13' is really a few feet short. With the 16' dimension, my seating position is 11+ feet from my La Scalas when they are in the corners and there is room behind the seats enough not to be in the bass boost area close to the walls.

I HIGHLY recommend a Heresy, Cornwall, or another La Scala for the center, with the crossover modified to as closely matched your La Scalas as possible. I'm running a Heresy with a slightly modified Type AA network that matches my La Scalas except for the squawker section because of the 700 Hz crossover point and the attenuation required.

[jdm56]

Well, if you're not confused and/or disgusted by now...here's another two cents worth:

I think the best advice you've got so far is to keep your room's dimensions mathematically unrelated. In a nutshell, no identical dimensions or dimensions that are one-half, one-quarter, one-eigth, etc. of another dimension. As for size, yes, the la scala is a bit big for your first room size (13x14), but not for the second (14x25). Big physically, but not big in the sense of too much bass. If you are intent on keeping the la scala's as your main l&r speakers, I would just make the room as big as possible, keeping in mind the "sound" advice to watch dimensional relationships. Do some research on small room acoustics. It's very fascinating stuff! And one more thing: Be prepared to add a good subwoofer or two. For one thing, the lascala does not really do any deep bass anyway. And for another, I've found them to be very effective in difficult rooms for smoothing and extending bass response. Good luck!

[tragusa3]

My first post in this forum.

Interesting comment jdm56. I just changed out my front three to LaScala's and although they are known for lack of bass, it is quite evident in my room that they improved that very thing! It is much smoother and seems to dig even lower. If you asked me for the top few improvements they made for me I'd have to say they improved my subwoofers!

FWIW, my room is 17.5'x32'x9'ht and I am having some struggles with the subwoofers. At first, I thought it was just the volume of space being demanding, but I'm now thinking I've got a nasty dimension ratio. I'll overcome it, but the room is definetely not playing a "supportive" role.

[jdm56]

Your room is a bit like mine (16x18.5x8.75). Some dimensions are just a bit like kissing cousins...they're too nearly related! I suspect the worst thing with mine is the niche built into one of the long walls. It sets back another foot and a half, floor to ceiling, and angles out to join the room propers' wall at 45 degree angles. Essentially, I built a six foot parabolic reflector into a long wall. Not good, especially considering that factoring the niche into the overall room dimensions gives me 17.5x18.5x 8.75. Again, not good at all! But after fighting it for ten years and even giving up on it for two-channel music, I finally found the solution...speakers that sound wonderful in this very difficult room. I'd tell you what they are, but I don't want to be a flame-starter. Check out my profile if you're curious.[:#]

Regarding your la scala's, I meant no offence...just reporting my experience with them. I had a pair of LS2's in a very good sounding room and the bass was shelved down about 6-9 dB below the squawker from about 200Hz down to 50-60Hz where it dropped like a rock. I only used a relatively inexpensive digital amp with them so maybe that was the problem, although the same amp did bass just fine with other speakers. And I know bass performance can be very subjective. One person's thin bass is another's fast bass. I think I know what you mean about the la scala "improving" your subs, though. I felt the same way. I used a pair of Velodyne DLS4000R subs with the LS2's I had, and those subs never sounded better than they did with the la scala's. It seems that even when using subs, bass character can still be defined by the main stereo speaker pair. It must have something to do with the leading, transient, percussive sounds of bass instruments that are still reproduced by the mains.