stupid question...

[banasikdrummer]

I'm fairly new here and have some questions about room dimensions
and speaker placement, as I've heard it can affect the sound quality
just as much as having low-end materials. I just recently bought
RF-35s, RS-7s (with stands), and an RC-7 and had hoped to have them up
and running to replace small speakers that I had.

I was reading
through some other posts in the architecural thread and read somewhere
that with small rooms you don't want ot try to squeeze lots of speakers
into it. Since I'm in college, I don't really have the option to have a
dedicated home theater room, and was planning on tossing all of my
speakers in my bedroom (which is 11'x13.5'). Will having all of these
speakers in such a small space make the speakers sound significantly
worse than if I had them in, let's say, a living room?

[DrWho]

Generally speaking, the smaller the room the worse it's going to sound.

Does that mean less/smaller speakers are going to sound better than

larger speakers in a smaller room? I don't think so. In fact, one could

readily argue that increased directivity will reduce the speaker/room

interaction and thus avoid many of the detrimental effects of smaller

rooms. And the only way to increase directivity is to make the speaker

larger...not smaller. (Increased directivity means the speaker sprays

sound over a smaller area - picture it as a focusing effect that keeps

the sound from bouncing off the side walls of your room).

The only time you can claim speakers are too big is when you're forced

to sit too close to the speakers such that the sound doesn't have time

to meld together. Imagine sitting 1" from the speakers...as you can

imagine, you're either going to hear the woofer or the tweeter, but not

both at the same time. But as you move further back, you can start to

hear both the tweeter and the woofer. Apparently the distance at which

the sound gels together can be roughly approximated as 10x the driver

spacing. So on the RF-35, you're looking at about 12" or so? That means

you need to sit 10 feet back! So any amount closer that you sit, the

more fine-tuned your listening and speaker position needs to be. You

could probably get away with 6 feet and not notice huge detrimental

effects, but it's not going to be ideal.

It's been my experience with smaller rooms that the bass response

suffers the most....likely because the fundamentals for all the

standing waves in the room occur right around the vital 50Hz-100Hz

range. So on top of difficult blending between woofer and tweeter, you

will need to fight an unnatural tonal balance in the system. Because of

this, moving the speakers and listening position around as little as a

few inches can yield dramatic changes in the sound - which is why

proper placement is considered such a vital aspect of 'tuning a system'.

Taking all of this into account, it follows that the best way to

optimize the listening experience in your room is to sit as far away

from the speakers as possible while trying to find locations that

minimize the detrimental effects of standing waves. One way to achieve

this is to place the speakers near the front corners of the room and

then put the main listening position along the rear wall. While this is

generally considered bad audiophile practice, I've found that this is a

very good compromise for a very small room. Nulls don't usually build

up along the back wall and since you're sitting so close the

reflections off the back-wall don't have a huge impact either. The

biggest downside is that it is very difficult to maintain stereo

symmetry with all the other furniture that needs to be in the room.

The nice thing about changing the layout in a room is that it is a free

thing to experiment with (as long as you've got plenty of time on your

hands). And really, the best way to find the best layout is to

experiment and get a feel for how your speakers interact with your

room. This would involve walking around and noticing how dramatically

the sound changes.

Anyways, that's just my take on the situation and I'm sure others will

chime in with different experiences and opinions. If it's any

encouragement, I've been dragging around Marantz 940's and Klipsch

Chorus II's throughout college and have been greatly enjoying the music

to which I listen. Afterall, when it's all said and done enjoying the

music is all that matters anyway.

[banasikdrummer]

Alright, I forgot to mention this before, but my drumset takes up a
good chunk of my room (the farthest points of the drumset make it
roughly 8'x9')....so that makes the listening area of my room out to be
either 5.5'x13.5', or 11'x6.75'.

The way I have my drums set up
now, my listening space takes on the latter, which seems like it might
be the better choice, since the RF-35s are supposed to be at least six
feet apart, and I'm supposed to be (as Dr. Who stated) about ten feet
away. My concern, though, is with the RS-7s. With the set-up I would be
going with now (assuming I can't sweet talk my way into taking over
another room for HT), each RS-7 would be about three feet to either
side of my head, and no more than a foot behind me. Would that be a bad
thing or not, since mostly all of the sound is going to be coming from
the RF-35s and RC-7?