Help with Speaker Sound

[Bazooka]

I have recently purchased RF82, RC62, RS62 and RW12d mated to Yamaha RX 861. I listened to the same system at the dealer using the same CD (Linkin Park - Minutes to Midnight, Eric Clapton/JJ Cale and a few others) and it sounded great.

Now at home (I have a smallish room, prob 4m x 7m) listening to the same CD I can hear some jarring/distortion at high frequency, although still sounds pretty good. What could be reasons for this? (room size, newness of speakers..)

[pauln]

Never heard of Linkin Park... maybe the jarring/distortion is the way the CD was made. Maybe you are playing it too loud?

[Islander]

Your new speakers may take a week or more to sound their best, but they should not sound bad. Your room is not too small, but you may have to experiment with speaker placement. The first place that seems logical or convenient is not always the best-sounding spot. Are your main speakers on the long wall or the short wall? I don't have any experience with your models, but Heritage speakers generally sound best on the long wall.

Also, how is the sound of your room itself? If you clap your hands, do you get an echo? If someone is on the other side of the room, can you hear him clearly? The extreme cases would be bare floors and no furniture, or completely filled with stuff. Either way, the sound wouldn't be good, too echo-ey or too muffled. The dealer's showroom may have been set up to sound good, if it wasn't one of those warehouse shops.

As well, is your receiver set up? If it has one of those impedance switches on the back, set it to 8 ohms with whatever speakers you're using, or the bass will sound thin. Some surround programs may not suit certain CDs, so try the Straight or Effect Off setting.

A modern AV receiver is pretty complex, plus you've got 5 speakers, is that right? Don't expect to get everything dialed in perfectly the first week.

Relax and listen for a few more days, then try some adjustments. You may want to make notes about various receiver settings.

[Frzninvt]

Another issue is some lower to mid-level Yamaha receivers are notoriously bright and can be harsh and edgy when paired with Klipsch speakers. You also have consider than the RIAA is recording new CD's at such high levels the distortion cannot be avoided when listening at any level especially with rock music.

[pauln]

So, CDs started out "perfect", but with time the concensus addmitted that the early ones were actually a bit rough after all, then they got better for a while maybe, but now the levels are so maxed that portions of lots of current fare are clipping (recorded that way) and when they do the peaks are signaling spurts of DC to the speakers...

[Islander]

Just bought a copy today of the Flaming Lips CD Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and was surprised to notice it's about 6 dB louder than most of my other CDs, meaning comfortable listening levels called for the volume to be 6 dB lower than usual. On the first listen, it sounds quite good, though, with good dynamics and a "big" sound. Cool lyrics, too. It's from 2002 and doesn't seem compressed like some of the new CDs I've read about.

[pauln]

Are the quieter ones particularly older? Many of the new CDs are pegged all the way up to the last bit allowing no headroom for peaks... OK, I see the loud one is from 2002 and you say it does not sound compressed... maybe it has more dynamics and sounds louder than the compressed ones?

[oldbuckster]

Listening to a Stereo in a Stereo dealers showroom is really not a good place to do it. Home is the only place the sound should matter, where you intend to use it, not where the dealer has it set-up to sound best, so he sells more

[MatrixDweller]

My RB81's took a little while to break in. They didn't sound distored though. I thought they sounded really good out of the box actually.

What did the dealer have hooked up to the speakers? They could have had a higher end CD player and Receiver (or seperates) which would blow your Yammie out of the water.

What sort of speaker wire are you using? Main thing...is it thick enough. I noticed a difference in sound quality when going from some cheap walmart 16 gauge wire to 12 gauge OFC wire. (12 gauge is overkill BTW but 14 will do the trick). That shouldn't be the problem though.

HOw do you have your CD player hooked upi to your receiver? Analog or bitstream? Try switching.

What about room treatments? You could be hearing the effects of bad room acoustics?

How about dirty power? Maybe you've got a lot of noise on the line your amp is hooked up to. Is it on the same circuit with any appliances?

Anyone else for some suggestions?

[DrWho]

So, CDs started out "perfect", but with time the

concensus addmitted that the early ones were actually a bit rough after

all, then they got better for a while maybe, but now the levels are so

maxed that portions of lots of current fare are clipping (recorded that

way) and when they do the peaks are signaling spurts of DC to the

speakers...

CDs started out as copies of tape and vinyl which is the reason for

their rough sound at the beginning. The perfection that was being referred to was the fact that every copy was identical to the previous...something you can never achieve with any other analog source.

Then there was a short period of

time where studio engineers needed to learn that you can't clip digital

in the same manner that you would ALWAYS clip tape. The noise floor on

tape was simply so awful that you had to run it into tape compression

all the time. Once that was learned, everyone realized that the

recordings sounded quiet and started adding compression to give it the

same forward sound you got with tape compression. It's kinda retarded

in my opinion, but society was already conditioned by the shortcomings

of the old mediums...not to mention more people listening in the car

where compression is required. Anyways, you'll find that most modern

recordings are not clipping so no DC is being produced. Granted, some albums have crap loads of compression, but that's usually used in cases where

the musicians suck and don't know how to do dynamics.

As far as Linkin Park...most of their recordings are extremely

compressed and should sound brittle and obnoxious. There is a rare song

or two that sound pretty good, but for the most part you need to be

listening on a system with a huge rise in the bass response (since

that's what usually happens in the car). I guess you could try turning up your subwoofer.

That said, if you thought it sounded good in the store with the same components, then the only thing left to blaim is the room acoustics. It doesn't seem to be a very popular topic (dunno why), but it has a tremendous impact on the perceived quality of the system. Are the highs really distorted or does it sound more like a lack of bass? Have you tried moving the speakers around in your room and toe-ing them in and all that? Would you happen to have anything more acoustic sounding to determine if the distortions aren't part of the recordings?

[DrWho]

HOw do you have your CD player hooked upi

to your receiver? Analog or bitstream? Try switching.

I just wanted to mention that practically every receiver on the market

converts all analog inputs to digital, which means you always want to

send a digital signal to the receiver (to avoid extra AD/DA stages).

The reason they convert to digital is because all of the bass

management and speaker settings cannot be achieved with analog...they

have to use DSP. The nice thing about digital is that the signal does not get degraded by "cheap" equipment - it's digital so everything is bit for bit identical regardless of the player. But that also means the quality is limited by the DAC (which may or may not be a good thing).