Using the mid and high frequency trim pots, we would adjust the tonal balance to typically that of the B&K target frequency response (discussed later). The bottom end was super tight and still went to 20 Hz. Those Urei/JBL 813B "time aligns" were being driven by 2.4 kilowatts of Crown power. By far the best sounding critical listening environment I have ever heard. I was lucky to have been involved in the ground up build of this facility with Chips Davis: I learned a lot. I was fortunate enough to have worked in very nice control rooms, with state of the art acoustics and monitoring. decoding) the soundstage.īoth Dolby Labs, “5.1 Channel Music Production Guidelines”, and “ITU-R BS.775-1* MULTICHANNEL STEREOPHONIC SOUND SYSTEM”, (and ANNEX 1 for stereo) have similar “specifications” when it comes to interfacing the speakers to the room.įull disclosure, in a previous career, I worked as a recording/mixing engineer for 8 years. physical distance) between speakers, walls, and listening position is the key to accurately reproducing (i.e. This means trying to achieve symmetry as close to a tight tolerance as possible. Here is an example "blueprint" of the type of speaker to room interface setup required for playback if the goal is to hear what the mixing engineer intended to be heard as accurately as possible. There are a couple of reasons for this that will be brought forward later. But once the speakers were tuned to the room, it was impressive to hear the rock solid 3D soundstage that these speakers reproduce. In my friend’s case, given the limited space, this is how it turned out. It is not the end of the world if it can’t be done for whatever reason. Step 1 Check to see if the speakers and listening position can be set up in an equilateral triangle. As mentioned at the top of the article, I tried to write it in easy to perform steps. Here is a check list I assembled for this calibration task. The satellites and passive sub are powered by 100 watt per channel vintage NAD power amplifier, using the preamp section of the NAD integrated amplifier to drive the amp. The bass frequency response was smoother, both from a listening, and as it turns out, a measurement perspective. In my friends listening tests, plus mine, we found the bass response was smoother with the driver firing towards the rear wall, with the ports facing the listening position. The speaker is mounted such that if the ports are facing the rear wall, the speaker is facing the listening position (i.e. In the above picture, the bass cabinet is upside down showing the two vented ports on the bottom. The passive sub-woofer is a sensitivity matched 10” Pioneer polypropylene driver with a dual voice coil that replaced the original Paradigm driver in which the surround rotted away. The tweeter is an interesting Philips ribbon design. The DIY satellite speakers are enclosed in a designed (using Thiel Small parameters) sealed box using a Seas 6 1/2” woofer that has a characteristically smooth frequency response. I tried to present this in a step by step format so if desired, by following the same steps, you could obtain similar results. This is a walkthrough of what we did, how it sounded, and lessons learned. While visiting a friend in The Big Smoke recently, I had an opportunity to assist in tuning a set of DIY speakers to his critical listening environment.
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