Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater What should I upgrade?

Thanks for all the great comments/suggestions. I have considered the room treatment path. There are some fairly cheap room accoustic panels I found while browsing on the audioholics website. The company's name is not coming to me at the moment....I agree that every room is different in it's sonic characteristics. The demo room I was in was probably treated as this was a high end store that sells Runco, B&W and the like. It was dark in there so I didn't really have a good look at the walls. The assumption is most likely correct since they are trying to setup an optimal environment for selling the equipment to perspective buyers.

I have used Yamaha receivers in the past and feel that the HK has a much better calibration tool. That being said, I will "splurge" and get the SPL meter this weekend and tune up the good old Polks.

My room isn't too bad sonically as I have wall to wall carpenting, a bookshelf and plenty of furniture throughout the space. But, if I can find those accoustic panels I mentioned, I will grab some of those puppies. The WAF factor on those will be mighty low....but so is everything else I try to do with that room (recessed lighting, 106 inch Carada Screen, mounted projector..etc etc..)

I do know from experience that good room treatment can make even crappy speakers sound decent. My buddy built a full scale theater in his basement and fully treated the room for sound. But, there is a limit to how much performance you get. If you put say some Axioms or Rockets in that space I'm sure they'd blow his gear away. Because they are better speakers.

So, for now I will try the SPL meter and maybe a few accoutic panels. I will probably still upgrade the speakers but will see what these two items can bring out of my current system.

Thanks again for all the helpful comments. Even if you are living in a crappy room!!

Guys and gals,

Here is the link to the accoustic panels I was referring to. They are the GIK 244 absorption panels. Sounds like a no brainer to get these puppies. But like I said, they will probably have a very low WAF unless you can color match to your walls so they are less noticable.

http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/acoustics/gik-acoustics-244-absorption-panel-review

Enjoy!

This thread raises questions that make for interesting discussion but in my opinion the answers for same can’t be given as generalized firm conclusions. This is a “boxers or briefs” underwear question – and like all such questions the best answer in my view is as Bob Dole famously resolved: “Depends”.

I would grant as a premise to the discussion that your system can’t sound any better than your speakers – just as it can’t sound any better than the program material you choose to play.

Speakers are that fundamentally important. If you don’t pick superlative music to play, the output of the system, in the end, can’t be superlative, and by the same token if your output transducers are not superlative… well you get the idea.

I would further agree that program reading components [CD players], amps, and cabling can all be had in the current market for very low costs on a comparative basis versus the cost of pursuing excellence in speakers. This is not surprising given that all the gear upstream of the speakers has become by comparison trivial to produce to exacting tolerances and tight specs thanks to modern manufacturing techniques and the state of the art in electronic circuit design. Speaker builders at the top end of the food chain on the other hand don’t have equal access to the electronic wizardry and mass production advantages that for example a CD player builder does.

Because of the fact a speaker by definition must interact with the real world [move air in a controlled fashion] one simply doesn’t have the ability to short-cut around big problems inherent in the laws of physics with mass produced IC chips or a fat read ahead buffer.

If you want a speaker to produce tight controlled low frequency sound you have to use a high quality low frequency driver [not a trivial thing to produce], and you have to mount it in a very stiff box built to exacting standards… design a x-over circuit that matches the abilities of the LF driver, precisely mount HF elements, taking into account time coherence… and on and on... all the while implementing these design elements at a real world scale. In short, you can’t micro-process your way around the challenges of sound production at the speaker end of the system with anything close to the facility one can use such techniques further up stream.

As a result I would consider it silly for person to divide up their system budget on anything approaching an equal basis between electronics and speakers. The rational choice to me is obvious… you heavily weight your budget to getting the best speakers you can afford.

But when it comes to acoustic treatment of a space, one runs into a very similar set of choices. Your system can’t sound better than the room you put it in, and in small rooms [less than 7,000 cubic feet or so – on the order of 19x37x10’] the laws of physics leave you with conditions that electronic wizardry cannot address. For example, the modal density in small room results in the inability of an untreated space to produce smooth, tight-sounding low frequency resonances. And this is true no matter how much you paid for your speakers.

The example given above of a 19x37x10’ room has a 38 distinct resonances below 100 Hz [Axials=10, Tangentials=20, Obliques=8]. That’s 38 frequency zones supported by the natural reverb field of the room… alternatively an 11x12x8’ room has only 8 [Axials=4, Tangentials=3, Obliques=1]. In the smaller room you’ll never get your sound system to have anything approaching the smooth low frequency response it will exhibit in the larger room absent acoustic treatment. Therefore, it is rational to budget accordingly.

Fantastically elucidating post, Scott. You've set quite a high bar for yourself as far as post quality and signal to noise ratio goes. I hope you can keep it up.

See, I told you. They just think you are more cuddly than me!