Klipsch La Scalas Too Big For Room?

[Evolvo]

I have a pair of la scalas on the long wall of a 16' X 11' Room with 7' high ceilings. The speakers are about 12' apart and I sit about 1 feet from the 11' wall so if you factor in the 2' of the la scalas I'm about 8' ft away from the the center of both speakers. Should I sell these and go with some Heresies or Quartest?

I'm simply wondering can speakers be too big for the room. I hate to sell them. I have a pair of Cornwalls those might be too big too, but they have less depth.

Also what are your thoughts on placement in such a room, should speakers be closer together given the distance I sit back. I'm so close that unless I'm in the center of the room I can hear the speakers individually.

Please let me know your thoughts thanks.

[Islander]

Of course they are not too large! However, if you need some guidelines, here they are:

1: Are you able to get into the same room as the speakers? Yes? Then the room is large enough.

2: Actually, Guideline 1 is about it. La Scalas can be used in any room that will physically accommodate two speakers and one listener. If you prefer listening in mono, your room only needs to be large enough to contain you and one (1) La Scala.

As for placement, the recommended starting point is usually to arrange the speakers and listening position to form an equilateral triangle. This means that the distance between the front centres of the speakers should be the same as the distance from the speakers to the listener. If the speakers are 10 feet apart, the listener should be 10 feet away.

However, that's only a starting point, and some rooms may give the best sound with a different arrangement. Find out what works for you.

If speakers are too far apart, you may get a "hole in the middle" effect. The cure is to either move the speakers closer together, or add a centre speaker. Either solution is equally valid. If you're not noticing that problem, your speakers are not too far apart.

Also, the direction of the speakers makes a big difference. It's usually best to aim La Scalas toward the listener, but this can cause the narrow sweet spot you referred to. If you always listen alone, it's not a big problem, but if more than one person is often listening, you could toe the speakers in a bit less, which should widen the sweet spot.

Every room is different, so don't hesitate to experiment in order to find what's best in your room. Try different positions and directions, and try each one for a few days, with a variety of music.

Hope this is helpful.

[Evolvo]

Great response, thanks. What is this hole in the middle you refer too, Is it essentially where your not really getting a full music reponse from directly from the center of the room. I think I might have experienced this. The music doesn't sound quite as put together as it should. I think I can make it sound good it's just that there seems to be a limited sweet spot and if I toe them out then it doesn't sound as good in the center. This is kind of why I was wondering would a smaller speaker exhibit different room acoustics when it comes to the sweet spot. Because with a smaller speaker I would be able to have the speaker back further and move them furhter apart to accomodate more listeners.

[homeskizzle]

1: Are you able to get into the same room as the speakers? Yes? Then the room is large enough.

This quote is absolutely fantastic. My room is 12 X 30 and I have the LS on the 12 side. My couch "divides" the room at 7.5 from each LS (Doorways and other pillars force me to keep the couch where it's at in the basement). I am running La Scalas for Left and Right in my setup and I sit about 7.5 feet (Okay, so I just measured with a tape measure) from each speaker and there is about 7 feet between them (measuring from the closest point in each LS).

As for placement, the recommended starting point is usually to arrange the speakers and listening position to form an equilateral triangle.

Didn't know this, but glad to know I am close to the equilateral triangle. Thanks!

[Islander]

There will always be a limit to the size of the sweet spot, even with omni-directional speakers. Stereo speakers and recordings try to give the aural illusion of a sound stage that allows you to close your eyes and imagine all the instruments and voices clearly located in space, left to right and front to back.

Oddly, it depends not only on the speakers and the recording; even the player, pre-amp and amp contribute to the effect.

If the speakers are too far apart, the sound stage disappears, and you just have music coming out of two speakers. PWK believed that speakers sound best when placed in the corners of a room, so when he had rooms big enough that the hole in the middle appeared, he added a centre speaker, first a Heresy, then a La Scala. His first wife Belle grumbled about the looks of the utility-finish La Scala, so he designed the Belle as a beautiful substitute for the La Scala, and named it after her. He also designed a simple electronic box to blend the two channels and adjust the volume of the centre speaker so the sound stage was properly re-established.

Before doing something crazy like getting rid of your La Scalas, you should experiment with their placing. Klipschorns must be placed in corners, but one of the selling points of La Scalas is that there's more freedom in placing them. My listening room is open on the right side, so there's no bass boost available from the non-existent side wall. Therefore, to keep things even, I located the left speaker several feet from its side wall, so its bass balance and volume are a match for the right speaker.

When I first got the LS speakers, I had them on each side of the CRT TV, so they were only 5' apart, measured from centre-to-centre, and I was reasonably happy. They were near the north wall of the living room, which only goes halfway across the room, so moving them further apart would have impaired access to the room. Luckily, another forum member was in town a few months after I got the speakers, and he came over to visit and have a listen to the system. He immediately told me I needed to move them to the west wall and move them much further apart.

He was right, but I didn't have enough speaker cable to do it that day, plus moving everything in the room for an arrangement that faced 90 degrees to the left (including the small wall-mounted surround speakers I was using at the time) sounded like a big job. Within a few months I did get around to it, and it was really worth it!

Since the "portable" size of the La Scalas (they were originally designed for PA use onstage) means that the bass horn is too small to reproduce bass tones much below 50 Hz, and it actually begins to roll off at around 100 Hz, most owners add a subwoofer or two to help fill in the bottom end of the music. That makes corner placement quite unnecessary.

As well, unless your room is so small that you're climbing over your speakers, switching from speakers that are 24" deep (LS) to speakers that are 13" deep (Heresy) will not make a big difference. It would not change much to have the fronts of the speakers 11" further away from you, and you'd be losing that great La Scala sound.

The bottom line is that you should be able to find positions and directions for your speakers that will give you a good sound stage and a workably wide sweet spot. Heresys and Cornwalls are fine speakers, but they won't give you the big realistic sound you can get from a properly dialled-in pair of La Scalas and a subwoofer.