Hi!
I am currently building my stereo setup after moving to new apartment and my living room looks like pictured below. It has 44sqm together with kitchen area. The yellow lines are the windows (85% of the wall height).
The TV wall has 6m and the sideboard under tv 2.7m which makes it impossible to place speakers in even distance to sofa which will be the main listening area.
Those will be standing speakers (Monitor Audio Silver 500 or Dali Opticon 6). Currently I have ordered Cambridge Audio CXA61, but then I started thinking about the positioning of the speakers. It’s not possible to change the room’s layout so the left speaker relative to speaker position will always be around 50cm closer. The question is now, can CXA61 be set up in a way to negate the distance and assymetric room? Or would I need something with DIRAC to do that? I initially was thinking about Arcam SA30, but went with CXA61 due to price difference.
Moving the balance control away from centre should improve the centring of the imaging. Individually EQing the channels should help improve the different boundary loading (and the room response potentially). The differing wall reflections will adversely affect imaging, tonal balance to some extent and spaciousness to some extent but cannot be effectively addressed electronically and will have to be lived with.
Thanks. I will try to see if balance calibration helps. Do you think curtains on the window walls would be enough to absorb reflections?
Depending on thickness they will lower the level of some of the high frequencies but not the mid and lower frequencies degrading the spectral balance of the reflections. What won’t change is the lack of symmetry generating different arrival times for the early reflections from left and right which is likely the main negative contribution. It should make differences but whether the sum is positive, negative or about the same is difficult to say.
i take it you’re already locked in on those speakers, but that positioning seems tricky
it’s a bit unorthodox, but have you considered smaller speakers, maybe ceiling mounted, so you can get a more symmetric targeting of the listening position? honestly probably not great either but i suspect it’d be an improvement
I would like to keep standing loudspeakers as they not only sound great (removing outside factors) but also have a decorative function in the room.
Dirac does indeed do timing-correction so I assume it’ll help massively in your situation.
I was thinking about SA30 for that specific reason, but reading how many issues there are with software and how impactful a software is (break or make) I decided to stay away from it :/ NAD M10 V2 would be my next choice but it’s over my budget. Are there any other options for room correction which could be added with usage of streamer?
Sorry, can’t help you there. I just run Dirac from my PC, have no experience with anything else.
Is it possible to calibrate using PC and then stream from phone or tablet with those settings?
I’m sure there is but again, can’t help you since I have my PC hooked up in my living room with the TV and the speakers so I just use local files for playback.