Is my room too small

FWIW, my room is 11*15, speakers along long wall, my seat < 1' from rear wall, which is treated w/ 4" thick bass panels behind my head, reflective side out; the ear ignores reflections < 10ms which a panel close to the head provides in mid-upper freq's while absorbing bass freq's which take longer to reflect and thus cause smearing, as Daverz mentioned.

i'm +/- 5db to 40hz or so IIRC. without room treatments, expect to be +/- 20db. seriously

Thanks to all of you, so bottom line here is treat the room and use whatever speakers I want? I see so many room set ups, even small rooms with Van Schweikerts VR4 jr mk 2 I figure these have to be good. So thats my choice.

You still need to choose speakers carefully so that they don't overload the room with bass. You can only do so much with bass traps.

I have a dedicated room that is 10x11. In a room this size, I think you are forced to use a speaker that is small(ish) and that does not reproduce much bass below about 50hz. Trying to shoehorn a speaker that is too large for your room is probably a recipe for failure IMHO.

The challenges of a small room include:

a) Early onset of reflections, much of which is inevitable. Coloration and image shift are both more likely to arise from early-onset reflections than from later-arriving ones, although direction of arrival and spectral content also play a role.

b) Room-induced gain over-emphasize the bass region, often resulting in boominess.

c) Room modes are more likely to be audibly detrimental in the bass region because modal behavior will set in at a higher frequency than in a larger room. This can cause or contribute to one-note bass/boominess/otherwise unnatural-sounding bass.

d) Some speakers need a fair amount of power to "come to life", which can work against getting good sound at the modest power levels typically required for adequate SPLs in a small room.

e) Placement constraints are often especially severe in a small room, which makes it more difficult to address the first three issues by optimizing speaker placement.

All of these problems can be addressed to some extent at the design stage. Unfortunately I don't know enough about the VR4 Jr. to comment on its suitability for a small room.

Duke
dealer/manufacturer