Re: Sierra Raal Towers soundstage vs LS50 Wireless
Originally Posted by
nquery
I realize that small rooms are demonized by node issues but this is not specific to any frequencies - there is a clear perceived rolloff around 70Hz and it gets consistently quieter as one moves down below that. Really really bizarre.
Not really. It's just the laws of physics talking to you. Room modes occur in just about any room and result at peaks and dips in the loudness of certain frequencies at certain positions in the room. This applies to both speaker position and listening position. If your speakers are sitting in a dip their output will produce less loudness at the frequency across the room. If your listening position is in a dip, you'll hear less loudness there but you may hear more loudness just a few feet away in any direction (even standing up).
That said, the bigger the room (generally) the lower the frequencies effected by room modes. There's more that one reason that commercial movie theaters typically have dimensions no smaller than 60 ft (the wave length of a 20Hz tone in air at standard conditions is 17.17m, or about 60 ft). It's not just to have more seats. It's because this pushes most of the room mode problems below 20 Hz where it's not much of a problem. Smaller rooms have room mode problems at higher frequencies unfortunately. Most of us have listening rooms like yours; most of us have room mode problems in the mid-bass; most of us spend some time tweeking speaker position and moving furniture to get the results we want. Welcome to the club!
As to your roll off problem, it's entirely possible that the room mode that's giving you your trouble is at just the right frequency that it extends the natural roll off of the bottom end of the Sierra Towers. So instead of having a knee in the response curve at, say 50 Hz, it sounds more like the knee has moved up to 70 Hz. If you've got a similar dip at your listening position... sounds like all your bass fled the room. Not all that unusual.
A few hours spent moving things and listening to the results can usually get you to a satisfactory compromise.
"If it sounds good, it is good." -- Duke Ellington