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Saturntube wrote:

Similar experience but I get to keep my "old" room. I have just changed my 5 way horn loaded down to 140 hz speakers to a friends room twice as big as mine, with an open back area into the house as your new room has and one side and the front have huge glass windows,  the horns have no trouble with a bigger room and soundstage is much better, tuning will be needed but the best improvement you will get will be the soundstage,  instead of sitting in between the instruments you will be seating at the directors spot with the whole orchestra in front of you and way back, more as a normal concert hall,  the instruments will be able to develop more freely and there will be more space between them, the trumpets will come from the back and the violins will appear closer, and the timbals will be way in the back there.Bass will be a problem, we are running SET for the horns, but the bass drivers are in a sealed cabinet with a couple of commercial sub amps and a pair of servo subwoofers for the lowest registers.  My friend has a DCS combo as his main source and since the DCS has a volume control and a 6 volt output, we thought we could get away with out a preamp, but we could not.  We added a preamp but it sort of loosed the magic in the mids, but the bass was better, at the moment we have the preamp hooked to the subamps only, and the DCS feeding the SET amps directly with a Y connector, we are not there yet but this has been the problem, loading the room with bass.  Now, we dont have the woofer towers you have and we are already getting there, I guess you should give the woofer towers a chance,  they might fill the room up to your expectations,  but even if they do I am sure you will make the huge horns anyway!!

Saturntube,

I know what to suspect from large room and I did hear a lot of installations in large rooms. I am not necessary like the “normal concert hall” presentation. This is what people usually get in large room. They are motivated by the external definition of “normal concert hall presentation”. It might be effective but I do not like it.

What people are missing is that during a concert in a music hall we have visual interaction with musicians and our sight allow our listing attention to focus our listening attention to any fragment of whole sound we wish. The reproduced sound has no such a luxury, we still can focus our listening attention but it works differently, I will not go into discussion now how we do it. However, a nearfield configuration, when we are “sitting in between the instruments”, do greatly improve the focusing capacity of the listening attention.

So, even in the large room I still will be trying to get the same nearfield setting. My estimate is that I will be looking at 9 feet listing distance and will see how I will go from there. The nearfield give a sense of intimacy and personal responsibility for the played sound. This sense of personal liability for sound I am not going change for the “much better soundstage” and more impressive “concert hall presentation”. There is no such a thing as “concert hall presentation”. I go to concerts and I did not see any default presentation. If you sit in the very best sit of the hall you have some kind of “presentation” but this presentation is absolutely irrelevant. Take a musical instrument take a note and see how your body reacts to the sound. You have a physical reaction to the event and instantaneous feedback.  The further away we go out of nearfield the less sensuality we experience during playback listening; at least it is my experience.

Again, it is depends how the things are done in a specific installation but from what I see so far I will be looking for nearfield in a larger room. It is not be as extreme as I use now in my small room but I still will not be using the whole room’s depth for my MF island.

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