Pictures of your speaker system

I tried this once (it seemed like an elegant solution, why couldn't subs occupy the same position as most floor-standing speaker's woofers?). I did have some Isoacoustic stands between the subs and speakers to decouple them as @dBel84 suggested, but ran into some bigger issues...

I quickly found out that my room was super susceptible to low-frequency issues – standing waves especially, where a wave reflects, intersects with itself and either amplifies or cancels out, causing all kinds of wonky peaks and nulls at my listening position.

Midrange and high frequencies can be absorbed and diffused pretty effectively by just having a well-furnished room. Low frequencies on the other hand don't really give a crap where you put your bookshelf or your couch, so finding the best placement becomes more important. You could get lucky and have good sub and speaker positions coincide (like @Riotvan) but this definitely wasn't the case for me so back to their previous least-bad position they went.

 

There are a number of things in this thread I wouldn't think would work but we do the best we can under the circumstances and who are we to question somebody else's geometry? Oh...wait a minute, I was a math teacher in the distant past

However....it's a crap shoot one usually doesn't win when the mains and subs are in the same physical location. Subs don't often give their best in the same location the mains work well. If you have subs you might as well figure out where they work in the room rather than reckon they'll work where the mains do their best work. One of the significant benefits of subs is that they can be located where they are most effective, something that can't usually be done any other way.

 

best kind of woofer, imho.

 

I see your speakers atop subs and raise you speakers UPSIDE DOWN atop subs! Tried it every which way and this sounded best to me, probably because the main woofers run full-range and this puts them at ear-level.



Gear rack -



The three screens are for mixing - edit window, mix window, plugins window / file browser. Isoacoustics pucks under the subs, cheapo decoupler cork/rubber decouplers under the mains.

 

Nakamichi RX505 - nice! Have one of those I inherited from my father-in-law. Always loved the Dragon, but the 505's reverse action was just so cool. Haven't seen one in someone else's stack for quite a while. Cheers

 

Quoting myself in order to have the pictures. As others have mentioned before most things we do are compromises.
The use of the subs as speaker stands here is surely not according to textbook.
Textbook case would be to place them in front of the windows making use of the windows as plate absorbers and in order to push up Mr. Allison’s revenge to higher frequencies. Alas the reason I was able to persuade myself to spend money on the woofers was that the woofers would only marginally more expensive than custom made speaker stands. If I put the woofers in the right place, I would have to spend money on speaker stands. I do not want to do that right now. Unfortunately I sold longer ICs some time ago which would allow me to experiment with woofer placement. Maybe I will take a measurement just running the woofers some day.
Vibrations due to the mains being placed on top of the subs does not bother me much. KH420 go down to about 26 Hz anyway. My subs go down to 13 Hz. There is few music going down so far. On the other hand the subs are nearly as heavy as the mains. The total is around 70 kgs per channel. I have put Sylomer absorbers underneath the subs. The material is similar to sorbothane but they have a software tool letting you calculate the effectiveness of the absorbers (damping factor against frequency). Tried absorbers between subs and mains, too but that got too wobbly. Took me several days to find the right placement of the absorbers to get the mains level left to right and front to back due to the uneven weight distribution. The absorbers set a bit slowly, making it impossible to judge whether the placement is right immediately after changing it. The decoupling should be effective down to around 16 Hz. I like to feel the airborne bass in my gut I do not like to feel it through my butt because the floor is shaking.

 

Still mourning the loss of my office (very small team + 2 members accepting jobs elsewhere = office suddenly superfluous) especially considering the amount of time I spent measuring, adjusting, and treating that space; but I've been happy enough with a small set up at home (still dual subs obviously, I have standards).

I was really hoping to make my Dynaudio M1's work in here and previously tried having them up on stands behind the desk, but they needed more space to breathe and sounded pretty poor as a result (they're billed as nearfield monitors but designed to sit atop a meter bridge, so not really suitable for super close desktop environments). The LSR-305's are a pretty significant step down but they're pleasant enough to listen to, in spite of the wonky positioning and boundary interference, and having a spot to hook up the turntable is a nice bonus. If it's looking like I'm going to be here a long time I'll probably pick up some Focus 160's or other compact Dynaudios unless something else catches my attention.

I still spend most of my time listening to speakers, but have been switching to headphones more when it gets noisy or I need to listen critically for anything since I can't trust my speakers as much. Trading adult coworkers for my wife and kids certainly presents some new challenges, but it feels good to be home.

 

Starting a new career as a new graduate in a totally new place, I had to heavily reconstruct my rigs for headphones and speakers (yeah moved from Tx to Pa). While social distancing only allowed me home-audition in shopping new gears, I managed to complete weeks of new speaker journey across quite a different price spectrum. Some just good as expected, some more impressive, some underwhelming, etc etc. Anyway, I settled down the product in the photo below -- quite surprising because I've been a bit hating this company. Tried my best to hate this time around as well, but failed to return them in the time window. Damn. Fortunately deal per se was pretty awesome (maybe corona sale?)


(Speaker to speaker disancing = 7ft; speaker to listening position = 6ft)

I know this statement sounds very silly. But.. to my ears, they sound like speaker-version Verite. Will post more later in other thread.

 

The guy I bought my TV from had these ELAC bookshelves. Big departure from their house sound, but they seemed pretty mature to me. Finally neutral, still decently clear, maybe somewhat of a bass bump? I've always thought the older ELAC's had a nice midrange and it seems that quality is still there. Looking forward to your impressions.

 

@Vtory those are basically passive Unity Audio Boulders right? Love look of those elac woofers.

 

Not perfectly sure, but isn't it more like Rock mk3? Boulders have two woofers + one coaxial midrange-tweeter. Rock3 two-way configuration with jet5 and al-coated paper woofer. Waveguide is larger with vela though.

 

I found an obscene deal on these Usher Be-10 speakers not too long ago. To my surprise, the already low asking price was negotiable, and I ended up paying a frankly criminal price for them. Turns out the guy didnt care to make money back, just wanted them out of his house. They are pristine and enormous, so I paid a piano mover to get them into my space.

Anyway, they've got a complement of exotic driver materials ("diamond" tweeter, berilyum coated midrange, kevlar woofer) but who gives a shit. They sound f'ing incredible. In no way are they 3x better than the 6381's they replace (scaled by MSRP), but I've always wanted to own a pair of great but impractical, unaffordable, diminished-returns, insane person transducers. Somehow stumbled into that for a song.

 

With the used market being what it is, my impression is that Usher hits this spot where the speakers are typically large, skew older, and are relatively unknown. Seems like this combination of things hugely deflates resell prices on an already high value for money item. Brand really deserves more awareness.

 

Well now, there's a strange ambition!

And one that most of us here have probably shared. Lucky man! Congratulations!

 

Going to enjoy these every day like I don't have a toddler that will inevitably headbutt the driver and tumble into the cabinetry (thanks!).

 

I strongly recommend an electric fence for every-day protection, and a cattle prod for more serious listening occasions. Mabe a taser for emergencies.

 

Metal grills have saved me more than a few times. Also I have more appreciation of unfinished DIY speakers with kids and pets around.

 

Made me to look it up — 203 lbs each! It will be fun playing with speaker placement.

 

One of the reasons I was able to buy my Atma-Sphere M-60 tube amps for such a good deal was the prior owner had kids and they kept touching the tubes and hurting their fingers! Luckily my brood are old enough to know better.