Theatre room change

[mischmat]

So we did some reno's and moved the theater room. I'm thinking of doing a speaker change due to location of where everything ended up. I was looking into buidling the Statement mini's since I already have enough drivers for 4 of them anyways. I just don't know how the'll work in this area.



I'm not sure what'll be better in this location. My current 4T or maybe the statements.

Anybody have suggestions.?

[Jed]

Pretty sure the Statements need 18" behind them because of the open mids. The Dynamic Series can get away with less, but the tonal balance might get warmer with the ports and woofers so close to the wall. If that's the case email me and I can suggest some changes in the crossover (for the 4T). I could also help you convert the 4TSE to a 2TSE. You'd have 2 fewer woofers and a crossover change on the woofer board, and with the 2T you could also port out the front.

Jed

[Face]

Looks like the theater setup was demoted.

And I agree with Jed, the Statements would not work in that setting.

[mischmat]

I could also help you convert the 4TSE to a 2TSE

I think I'll stick with the 4T, and build a custom entertainment unit instead. I like the sound more and more. Maybe if any change I'll look into by-amping them now that I have a new receiver.

[Generic George]

Maybe if any change I'll look into by-amping them now that I have a new receiver.

Bi-amping without active (electronic) crossovers, is basically pointless, especially if you are doing it with a receiver. Since they will generally deliver more power into fewer channels and less the more that you use.

It's also possible that you could actually reduce your effective power by bi-amping, since the power demands are not equal between the High/mid and the low freqs. Tweeters/mids generally only need a handful of wats, while low freqs tend to be what really suck up the power. So if you are say outputting 75 wpc into high-mid/lows and 100wpc into the combined, if you only actually use say 10 watts for the high mids, you are actually down 15wpc on the low freq.

Of course there is the whole "need to double power to increase SPL by 3 db" bit, so it's not likely to be a noticeable difference in any case.

In short, if you really want more power, buy a dedicated amp, but make sure is is at least 2x or 3x what your receiver pumps out.

[mischmat]

Specs on my particular amplifier show 90 wpc respectivly through full bandwitdth, on all channels. It's a new 7.2 yamaha amp, how close it is I don't know. I can switch it to a 5.2 setup and utilize the other 2 channels for bi-amping. Eventually I'll move into a emotiva or something along those lines for my front stage but for now it's more like "I have an itch to play" sort of thing.

My understanding of bi-amping also helps a little with clarity. But it could just be what and where I've read.

I am running into the issue Jed was saying with repsect to my fronts being a bit warm. I notice them being a bit heavy in the lower mids. I'll have to wait though till I build the entertainment unit so I can pull the fronts out off the wall. Think I may venture into a mic, so that I can take some measurements and see exactly where it peaks, and adjust the parametric to help. I didn't think about having to remove the XO from the speakers so mine are a bit difficult to access since I glued the boards in.

[Generic George]

Specs on my particular amplifier show 90 wpc respectivly through full bandwitdth, on all channels. It's a new 7.2 yamaha amp, how close it is I don't know. I can switch it to a 5.2 setup and utilize the other 2 channels for bi-amping. Eventually I'll move into a emotiva or something along those lines for my front stage but for now it's more like "I have an itch to play" sort of thing.

To clarify a bit, without an active electronic crossover you are STILL amplifying and sending a full range signal to both portions of the speaker. So the crossover network in your speaker will still be filtering out and wasting the power in the high/mid freq for the woofers and the low freq for the high/mid.

With an active electronic crossover, you are amplifying and sending to the driver only those frequencies that the driver will be reproducing, so there is no wasted power. Plus you can adjust how the frequencies are amplified, further reducing wasted power.

That's why passive bi-amping essentially accomplishes nothing. You are changing nothing about how the speaker really works.

Given how a modern multi-channel amp works, with a "pool" of power that gets divided up among the channels. You are almost always better off simply using fewer channels, than you are trying to passively bi-amp something.

RE: An external amp, these really only benefit you if you have difficult to drive speakers or you have speakers that need WAYY more power than receivers have IME.

So if you assume a worst case scenario with an AVRs amp, so that it produces significantly less power than an external amp. For yours say it really only produces 75 wpc.

You have to double the power every time you increase the SPL by 3 db. That means a 600 wpc amp is only 9db louder than your AVR. That doubling for each 3db means that an AVR with an amp that is even only somewhat more powerful makes things much worse in terms of what you need from an external amp for it to be usefully more powerful. If you had honest 130 wpc amps in your AVR, you'd need a 1040 wpc amp to get 9 db louder.

So if you really want higher SPL, then you are generally better off buying more efficient speakers than you are trying to buy bigger amps.

Given that a lot of speaker designs are only 84-88db efficient and there are speaker designs that exceed 100 db efficiency, one of the latter vs the former can give you the equivalent power of an amp x64 times more powerful (102db - 84db = 18db/3db = Six doublings).

This doubling also means that 99% of the time you are using only a handful of watts at most. Especially if you are not listening at "reference" volumes. So having gobs of power means most of it is just burning power and generating waste heat.

My understanding of bi-amping also helps a little with clarity. But it could just be what and where I've read.

This has no basis in fact I'm afraid. It's just another one of those audiophile myths. If there was in fact any difference, it would be totally swamped, by so many other factors that would be orders of magnitude more important.

I am running into the issue Jed was saying with repsect to my fronts being a bit warm. I notice them being a bit heavy in the lower mids. I'll have to wait though till I build the entertainment unit so I can pull the fronts out off the wall. Think I may venture into a mic, so that I can take some measurements and see exactly where it peaks, and adjust the parametric to help. I didn't think about having to remove the XO from the speakers so mine are a bit difficult to access since I glued the boards in.

Measurements are always good. You might want to look into room treatments, those WILL make a difference if done properly. Room correction (YPAO on the Yammies IIRC), can make a big difference, but there are limits to what they can do.

[Wheels]

+1 on the passive bi-amp discussion.

Another reason to go with separate Pre-pro and amp is to reduce the amount of noise near the low voltage pre-pro circuitry which can help with SNR. it doesn't help much, but to some; every little bit helps. And a dedicated amp will/should have better distortion ratings which means you can run at the same volume and sound clearer.

there's my 2 cents

[Jed]

Think I may venture into a mic, so that I can take some measurements and see exactly where it peaks, and adjust the parametric to help. I didn't think about having to remove the XO from the speakers so mine are a bit difficult to access since I glued the boards in.

You're probably getting some response elevation around 200hz or so. If you have a EQ, trying adjusting that area down a couple dbs. The way you have the speakers so close to the wall, it's almost behaving like an IB. I'd also try sealing the ports.

[Generic George]

Another reason to go with separate Pre-pro and amp is to reduce the amount of noise near the low voltage pre-pro circuitry which can help with SNR. it doesn't help much, but to some; every little bit helps. And a dedicated amp will/should have better distortion ratings which means you can run at the same volume and sound clearer.

there's my 2 cents

Even basic AVRs these days have sufficiently good SNRs (roughly 100db) that any advantage you'd get from a higher end Amp/Preamp arrangement is pretty much just gilding the lilly.

About the only time I've seen anything to indicate that you would get some benefit from going with this sort of arrangement, is if you have an extremely efficient speaker (something > 100db).

In that sort of case, where the efficiency of the speaker exceeds the noise floor of the amp/preamp, you might benefit from something wt a lower noise floor. As it is possible for you to be getting noise amplified to the point of audibility, even at moderate listening levels. In pretty much any other situation, any noise is going to be simply drowned out.

Generally speaking amps are pretty close to the bottom of the food chain in terms of bang for your buck, IME.