Sofa eats low bass?

[yfei]

Hi,

My setup is 2 B&W N803, no subwoofer. The sound was great, full of bass.
I just added a 3 seat mid size leather sofa to the center of the room. Suddenly all the low bass disappeared!
The room is about 100~120 inch wide, the sofa is 72 inch wide, the distance from speaker to front of sofa is 70 inch.
I tried move the sofa back toward the rear wall, further I move, more bass I got. And for the best bass, I need to remove the sofa from my room.

I wonder if you have noticed similar things, and have a solution to this?

[RobP]

Can you move your speakers back towards the wall?

[csuzor]

Sounds like you were getting a lot of reflections from the walls, increasing the apparent bass (and maybe other frequencies too). If the bass is too low compared to the rest, you will need to dampen higher frequencies now, with some acoustic treatment on the walls. But maybe, just maybe, the total response is OK now, and was "bass heavy" before?

[jlee]

Hi,

My setup is 2 B&W N803, no subwoofer. The sound was great, full of bass.
I just added a 3 seat mid size leather sofa to the center of the room. Suddenly all the low bass disappeared!
The room is about 100~120 inch wide, the sofa is 72 inch wide, the distance from speaker to front of sofa is 70 inch.
I tried move the sofa back toward the rear wall, further I move, more bass I got. And for the best bass, I need to remove the sofa from my room.

I wonder if you have noticed similar things, and have a solution to this?

The large sofa is a bass trap. Not much you can do except get 2 chaises instead of the sofa. I did an experiment with this and found all the bass hot spots in the room. Move the sofa into the hot spot, all of a suddent the hot spot is a low spot. I solved this a bit with multiple REL subs, which help make the distribution of deep bass around the room more uniform. I'm happy with the results and ended up keeping the sofa (I was seriously considering other options).

[Eliav]

Hi,

My setup is 2 B&W N803, no subwoofer. The sound was great, full of bass.
I just added a 3 seat mid size leather sofa to the center of the room. Suddenly all the low bass disappeared!
The room is about 100~120 inch wide, the sofa is 72 inch wide, the distance from speaker to front of sofa is 70 inch.
I tried move the sofa back toward the rear wall, further I move, more bass I got. And for the best bass, I need to remove the sofa from my room.

I wonder if you have noticed similar things, and have a solution to this?

Hi
IMHO, you may be experiencing one of two problems : 1. your sofa is actually a bass trap, hence the "boomy" sound disappeared, make no mistake though, bass traps makes bass sound tighter and better, it is not a bass eliminator !
2. the sofa is creating standing waves which actually cancel/defeat the low frequencies originally produced by your speakers.in this case you will need to either remove the sofa or use bass traps.

Building and installing bass traps is easy and cheap, results are stunning, please refer to previous threads

Check your speakers location in relation to the rear wall. this will definitely change the lowe ends.
good Luck
Eliav

[rockethouse]

Hi
IMHO, you may be experiencing one of two problems : 1. your sofa is actually a bass trap, hence the "boomy" sound disappeared, make no mistake though, bass traps makes bass sound tighter and better, it is not a bass eliminator !
2. the sofa is creating standing waves which actually cancel/defeat the low frequencies originally produced by your speakers.in this case you will need to either remove the sofa or use bass traps.

Building and installing bass traps is easy and cheap, results are stunning, please refer to previous threads

Check your speakers location in relation to the rear wall. this will definitely change the lowe ends.
good Luck
Eliav

Great post...

[yfei]

Thanks! After playing more with sofa's position, the result is interesting. When put sofa at different distances, actually the bass is tonally different.
At the position I originally mentioned, seems all bass are decreasing,
when I moves the sofa a little further the sound becomes overly warm (upper bass enhanced?) ,
moving it further way, at one point the bass becomes more solid and impactful. This is really good result, because originally I felt N803+Nuforce 9 combination sounds a little tube like, the bass lacks rock solid impact. Well, impactful bass might not be natural, and might be bad for music, but I enjoy it for watching movies.
move it further to the end of the room, I felt the very deep bass becomes too much, and not impactful anymore.

[Blazar]

The bass will be different in every position in the room with or without the couch. Bass absorbing furniture can only be a GOOD THING in achieving better equilization of frequencies. Furniture also reduces excess high frequencies "echoes" as well.

You will solve all your problems by adding some bass traps into as many room corners as possible.