Rug & Plants ... (feng sui for hifi's)

My room has a bookcase on the right-hand side and a barewall with mirror on the left-hand side of the wall. One problem I was experiencing was the image was not centre but about half-way towards the right speaker. My dealer explained this as being due to reflections on the left-hand side, blurring the sound, hence making the right-hand side sound stronger. Anyway, placing a large plant by the wall, just in front of the left hand speaker, has mainly readjusted the image to the centre of the speakers. Don't know whether the above explanation is correct, but the plant certainly did the trick.

......and on the subject of chairs - I had a chair between the speakers. This was also found to be responsible for a high frequency noise that was alo made for uncomfortable listening.

David

Sorting out your room accoustics can make a *huge* difference. It depends on just how bad your room is and how sensitive your system is to stray reflections. I don't know this for sure but I theorise that this is more critical for speakers that are designed to operate close to the wall than for floorstanders that operate a couple of feet away. This is because you have more flexibility in siting and can minimise some of the nasty effects of a live room. Fwiw my experiments have given enormous gains and I feel that in 13 years of owning Kans, I have only recently heard what they can truly do.

I have posted some of this before on a thread about Kan setup but in brief:

My listening room has a bay window on one wall, a chimney breast on the next, a big radiator on the next leaving me one flat wall (with a door at one end) to place the speakers against. With a moderate amount of furniture in the system sounded ok. I could tell that the room was live because you could hear an echo when you talked. I decided to do some experimenting....

First I tried piling as much squidgy stuff into the room as possible - quilts, bean bags, bin liners full of (not my) cuddly toys. I piled these up in alcoves, spread them across the floors and listned. The room was less live but little improvement in sound quality.

Then I emptied my wardrobe... I have a picture rail that runs around the room so I got all the shirts I could muster and hung them all the way around. *Big* improvement but not entirely practical so I started to experiment by taking shirts away. This led me to conclude (since verified by my dealer) that the wall to concentrate on is the one the speakers are up against plus the corners at each end. This went against my initial intuition but works for me.

I then ditched the shirts and got a length of underlay and attached that to the picture rail and tried various places with the rest of the room returned to standard unquilted mode. The only area that made a dramatic improvement was hanging it between the speakers. I then experimented with length. If it hangs down as far as the top of the speakers it kills the sound totally (as 2 be expected with Kans I guess), but by folding it in half upwards I had recreated the RFOS (room full of shirts) effect.

Since then, I have custom made a sound absorbant panel to hang on the wall in the appropriate spot and damped the corners with scrunched up curtains hung from the picture rail. This is a complete transformation of my system.

One other 'sound' tip from my dealer is to put coving around the room. I haven't done this since I am planning to move house this year and can't be arsed with any more decoration and diy. One of the main criteria will be a more hifi friendly listening room and I am also planning to get *really* serious about room accoustics and power supplies.

I definitely recommend experimentation in this area since it is potentially the most cost effective upgrade that you can do and seems to make much more diffence as you use better kit - I didn't really notice problems with a nait1 or 42.5. All of my efforts were sparked off by the arrival of a new S/C 82 a year ago.

Have fun

Cheers
Steve

Most 'normal' people would tell me to get a life

The reason I persisted with this is that you can get a lot of benefit for very little cost other than your own time.

Btw I forgot to mention that room tweaking has a low WAF, experiment when they are shopping or they will send for men in white coats.

Cheers
Steve