floors and walls

[dtximages]

Ray and John I wrote this message as a reply on another tread but i was afraid you wouldnt see it and i wouldnt be notified to a reply so here it is again.

Ray or John, are you saying that I would get more bass from a solid (slab) floor than a "springy" floor or would it just be less muddy. My bass sounds real heavy at some resonant freqs. Is that because of my springyness in my walls and floor? Both my falls and floor are not solid. Also, I

have areas in my room that seem to suck all the bass from my listening position. Like the inset where my door is generates ALOT of bass . Is that bad and is there a way to redirect it to my listening position? My la scalas have lost their vibrance and their punchyness due to it as well as my monster sw15 sub.

Thanks

[JohnA]

I would think flexible walls and floors would make the bass muddy by setting up resonance at some frequencies and not others. Placement in the room and its dimensions will cause peaks and nulls in the bass, so that some places have too much and others have none.

John

[J M O N]

CLS:

The answer to your question is both -- you will also get less bass. Sound is energy, and if your walls are flexing, then some of that energy is being used to flex the walls and you have less energy to make sound.

[dtximages]

Thanks for the replies. One more q. John, i know you have la scalas, could you tell me any placement tricks to maximizing their sound (long wall, short wall, distance between and away from walls etc)? Also, what about acoustic treatment. A local hifi guru said to put treatment behind the speaks and leave the rear wall alone bc you always need one live end and one dead end. I guess its the same for horn speakers too. Thanks again guys.

[Ray Garrison]

Live end / dead end is a great topic for starting arguments. Michael Green of Room Tunes fame hates the idea. He thinks overdamping is one of the evils propogated by otherwise well meaning but stupid people. Some high end dealers I respect believe exactly the opposite, and think that deadening the speaker end of the room and allowing the other end to reflect / disperse sound is the only way to get accurate soundstaging, depth and imaging. Me, I moved into a new house four years ago, and when I went into the music room (17 X 21 room, slab floor with tile covering) and clapped my hands, the "slap echo" was really, really awful. So I got three big panels of Owens Corning 700 series semi-rigid fiberglass panels (check http://www.owenscorning.com/comminsul/products.asp?product=1 ), about 4 X 6 foot each, covered them with very heavy black felt, and hung them on the wall behind the speakers. Worked like a champ - deadened reflections and echo without overdamping the room. Also put Cornertunes and Echotunes on the wall / ceiling boundries in a few locations.

I found that my La Scalas sound best when they are well away from the walls and corners. I have them about three feet away from the side walls, and about four feet out from the front wall (the front wall is the wall behind the speakers, the wall I'm looking at when I'm listening to the system). The bass response suffers in this location, rolling off very quickly below about 55 Hz, but they sound much more open and more natural there than they do when pushed into the corners. I took care of the limited bass response with an REL Storm subwoofer.

Ray

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Music is art

Audio is engineering

[jdm56]

Along the same lines Jmon was going down, hard concrete floors will absorb less energy than suspended wood floors which tend to absorb resonances to a point. So although hard and non-resonant can be a good thing, (less bass lost to floor absorption), depending upon your rooms dimensions, wood floors might actually sound better, because they can lessen resonant peaks. So basically, if you have really good room dimensions that spread out room modes evenly, tile on concrete would be superior, but if your room shape is less desirable, a wood floor may be preferable.

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JDMcCall