psychotropic
Well-Known Member
The Speakers
As you guys know from my riddle thread, I now own a pair of the Odyssey Epiphonys. Fantastic speakers. But not the easiest of babies to position. The reason I haven't been sitting around here raving about them is that I've been playing around with positioning them and various such experiments.
The Problem
Unlike the Ushers that I just plonked down in my room and sounded perfect from the word go, and even the various permutations and combinations that I tried did not yield too much of a difference in sound the Odysseys are fussy little bastards.
In their default position where my Ushers used to sit, the problem was that while the sound was expansive and musical and detailed, the low-end didn't have heft. Even when compared to my memory of the Ushers, and that was strange because these are speakers that go substantially lower than the Ushers with more slam. This was also surprising because I thought putting the rear-ported odysseys in my small room and so close to the wall would lead to overwhelming bass-bloom and not the reverse!
The Room
Here's a picture of my room so you guys can have a better idea. It's a square (pretty much a cube actually) 10 by 10 by 10.....terrible dimensions for a listening room I know, but I can't really help that. The green thing is my mattress on the floor. The bulls-eye is the listening spot where I plant a stool on top of my mattress and sit and listen
. Otherwise I just sit/lie on the mattress and listen.
The red boxes are the speakers and the white rectangle is the wooden cabinet on which it sits. The orange thing in the corner is my CD rack, the yellow box is my marshall guitar amp and the green thingie my guitar. The blue boxes are bed-side (mattress side) tables, roughly a foot and a half cubed. The red/brown bits are the windows (with curtains). On the left side are built in cupboards and the door in the corner.
The Trials
In order to check that the lack of low-end weight was not something to do with the chain or the components in it, I took everything to my hall and placed stuff with lots of space around and the problem was much less, if not completely gone, so I concluded that the issue to tackle was positioning/room interaction.
I moved the cabinet forward a few inches such that the distance from the rear port to the rear wall was exactly one foot. That didn't solve the problem. Then I tried various positions and angles and while some were a bit better than others, there was still not much of an improvement.
The Solution(?) - Sort Of
Then I tried something else, tipping the speakers forward by placing an inch or so of newspaper at their rear. This meant that the slope of the baffle reduced substantially and the drivers are pointing almost (but not quite) straight forward, and the sound is pointing staight at my curtains instead of the wall above. This yielded a noticeable improvement in the low-end. It's still not as deep as it can go in an ideal situation, but I was much happier now. But the presentation of the speaker changes also, since the tweeters are more on-axis the presentation is a bit more forward and detailed. The superb imaging and soundstage remain the same, and the mid-range continues to be beguiling.
The Way Forward - Please Help!
I do know that my listening room is far from perfect, and there's far more of the potential in these spekears that is lying untapped. There is a full-scale conversion of my second bedroom to a listening room that might happen, but at the moment, I would love to hear suggestions from you guys about what else I can do to extract more performance from these speakers with the constraints that I have, in this room. Please do not suggest expensive room treatments or room-correction EQ, I don't have the budget for that, but inexpensive tweak-y ideas are most welcome!
As you guys know from my riddle thread, I now own a pair of the Odyssey Epiphonys. Fantastic speakers. But not the easiest of babies to position. The reason I haven't been sitting around here raving about them is that I've been playing around with positioning them and various such experiments.
The Problem
Unlike the Ushers that I just plonked down in my room and sounded perfect from the word go, and even the various permutations and combinations that I tried did not yield too much of a difference in sound the Odysseys are fussy little bastards.
In their default position where my Ushers used to sit, the problem was that while the sound was expansive and musical and detailed, the low-end didn't have heft. Even when compared to my memory of the Ushers, and that was strange because these are speakers that go substantially lower than the Ushers with more slam. This was also surprising because I thought putting the rear-ported odysseys in my small room and so close to the wall would lead to overwhelming bass-bloom and not the reverse!
The Room
Here's a picture of my room so you guys can have a better idea. It's a square (pretty much a cube actually) 10 by 10 by 10.....terrible dimensions for a listening room I know, but I can't really help that. The green thing is my mattress on the floor. The bulls-eye is the listening spot where I plant a stool on top of my mattress and sit and listen
. Otherwise I just sit/lie on the mattress and listen.
The red boxes are the speakers and the white rectangle is the wooden cabinet on which it sits. The orange thing in the corner is my CD rack, the yellow box is my marshall guitar amp and the green thingie my guitar. The blue boxes are bed-side (mattress side) tables, roughly a foot and a half cubed. The red/brown bits are the windows (with curtains). On the left side are built in cupboards and the door in the corner.
The Trials
In order to check that the lack of low-end weight was not something to do with the chain or the components in it, I took everything to my hall and placed stuff with lots of space around and the problem was much less, if not completely gone, so I concluded that the issue to tackle was positioning/room interaction.
I moved the cabinet forward a few inches such that the distance from the rear port to the rear wall was exactly one foot. That didn't solve the problem. Then I tried various positions and angles and while some were a bit better than others, there was still not much of an improvement.
The Solution(?) - Sort Of
Then I tried something else, tipping the speakers forward by placing an inch or so of newspaper at their rear. This meant that the slope of the baffle reduced substantially and the drivers are pointing almost (but not quite) straight forward, and the sound is pointing staight at my curtains instead of the wall above. This yielded a noticeable improvement in the low-end. It's still not as deep as it can go in an ideal situation, but I was much happier now. But the presentation of the speaker changes also, since the tweeters are more on-axis the presentation is a bit more forward and detailed. The superb imaging and soundstage remain the same, and the mid-range continues to be beguiling.
The Way Forward - Please Help!
I do know that my listening room is far from perfect, and there's far more of the potential in these spekears that is lying untapped. There is a full-scale conversion of my second bedroom to a listening room that might happen, but at the moment, I would love to hear suggestions from you guys about what else I can do to extract more performance from these speakers with the constraints that I have, in this room. Please do not suggest expensive room treatments or room-correction EQ, I don't have the budget for that, but inexpensive tweak-y ideas are most welcome!
