In October 2007 I asked the question on this forum: "Is an 803/4/5 setup too large for my room?" To briefly recap, I was initially considering the 700 series, but was then trying to determine whether the 800 series would work for me given my slightly narrow room (12ft / 3.7m) and my wishes for both great stereo 2.0 sound and 5.1 for movies.
Well I received several responses, so Soundgravy, RebelMan, Briz vegas, BassThatHz and ShadowZA, I'd like to now say "thank-you very much" for your excellent advice and comments, and also let you know that I pretty much went with the consensus... and this was what I ended up with: Fronts: 803S, Center: HTM3S (on stand), Rears: 805S on stands, Sub: ASW825.
Are they too big? No, although it was quite a shock when we got all the boxes in the room... I did begin to think I'd made a major error of judgment, but once unpacked, they fit in very nicely. How do they look? Superb, they're in the cherry finish which is really beautiful. So how do they sound? Absolutely excellent (more on this later). Has this "project" succeeded? Oh, yes! (Well for now, anyway, but there's definitely a second phase yet to come, i.e. better amplification.)
I'm currently driving everything with a Yamaha 3800 receiver (140W/ch). Since this is a 7.1 unit, I'm able to bi-amp the front 803S, which does make up to some extent for this being a "lesser" amplifier than most on this board would recommend for these speakers. That point was raised by several people at the outset, but I needed to get the system working, and then bide my time for a while before I could consider a higher-end amp setup. Since this is my first foray into 5.1, the 3800 has been a very good way to get started. It does a great job of selecting/switching the various components -- certainly a far cry from my "olde" Quad 33 that it's replaced! I have a few issues but they're likely outside the scope of this forum. As I said, I find the sound to be excellent -- and it's a very pleasing sound, although I do get the impression that it's perhaps slightly compressed. This is true even at moderate listening levels; at higher volumes you can just sense a little harshness creeping in too -- both of these effects, I'm sure, are amplifier related and so are probably holding the speakers back from being at their very best. For the wiring, I bought a couple of reels of Liberty 2 pair x 12 AWG THX speaker cable and then spent what seemed like forever soldering on 4 mm plugs.
So that's my update on the story so far. One thing I'm curious about... the Yamaha (and I'd guess, many similar receivers) has an option to optimize the sound in some way -- you plug a mic into it and it runs through various test tones and pink noise bursts, etc. Then after a couple of minutes you get some graphs showing how it's adjusted its parametric equalizers to compensate for room and speaker effects. I spent a couple of days listening to the system after it had done this, but I always felt that sound was "hollow". So I then reverted to having no equalization -- in my opinion, a much better sound, and have not gone back in over two months now. It made me wonder if such automatic processes are to some extent taking away the natural sound of the speakers. After all, if you could equalize away such deficiencies, that would imply even cheap speakers could be made to sound equal to much better ones, yet that clearly isn't true. I suppose if you have a room that has certain strong resonances then you could benefit from suppressing those frequencies. What are your views on this topic in relation to use with high-end speakers such as the B&Ws? Is this just a gimmick so receiver manufacturers can put yet another logo on their front panels?
Thanks again for such a great forum.
Well I received several responses, so Soundgravy, RebelMan, Briz vegas, BassThatHz and ShadowZA, I'd like to now say "thank-you very much" for your excellent advice and comments, and also let you know that I pretty much went with the consensus... and this was what I ended up with: Fronts: 803S, Center: HTM3S (on stand), Rears: 805S on stands, Sub: ASW825.
Are they too big? No, although it was quite a shock when we got all the boxes in the room... I did begin to think I'd made a major error of judgment, but once unpacked, they fit in very nicely. How do they look? Superb, they're in the cherry finish which is really beautiful. So how do they sound? Absolutely excellent (more on this later). Has this "project" succeeded? Oh, yes! (Well for now, anyway, but there's definitely a second phase yet to come, i.e. better amplification.)
I'm currently driving everything with a Yamaha 3800 receiver (140W/ch). Since this is a 7.1 unit, I'm able to bi-amp the front 803S, which does make up to some extent for this being a "lesser" amplifier than most on this board would recommend for these speakers. That point was raised by several people at the outset, but I needed to get the system working, and then bide my time for a while before I could consider a higher-end amp setup. Since this is my first foray into 5.1, the 3800 has been a very good way to get started. It does a great job of selecting/switching the various components -- certainly a far cry from my "olde" Quad 33 that it's replaced! I have a few issues but they're likely outside the scope of this forum. As I said, I find the sound to be excellent -- and it's a very pleasing sound, although I do get the impression that it's perhaps slightly compressed. This is true even at moderate listening levels; at higher volumes you can just sense a little harshness creeping in too -- both of these effects, I'm sure, are amplifier related and so are probably holding the speakers back from being at their very best. For the wiring, I bought a couple of reels of Liberty 2 pair x 12 AWG THX speaker cable and then spent what seemed like forever soldering on 4 mm plugs.
So that's my update on the story so far. One thing I'm curious about... the Yamaha (and I'd guess, many similar receivers) has an option to optimize the sound in some way -- you plug a mic into it and it runs through various test tones and pink noise bursts, etc. Then after a couple of minutes you get some graphs showing how it's adjusted its parametric equalizers to compensate for room and speaker effects. I spent a couple of days listening to the system after it had done this, but I always felt that sound was "hollow". So I then reverted to having no equalization -- in my opinion, a much better sound, and have not gone back in over two months now. It made me wonder if such automatic processes are to some extent taking away the natural sound of the speakers. After all, if you could equalize away such deficiencies, that would imply even cheap speakers could be made to sound equal to much better ones, yet that clearly isn't true. I suppose if you have a room that has certain strong resonances then you could benefit from suppressing those frequencies. What are your views on this topic in relation to use with high-end speakers such as the B&Ws? Is this just a gimmick so receiver manufacturers can put yet another logo on their front panels?
Thanks again for such a great forum.
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