Help with imaging


Hope you guys can help me with an extremely annoying problem I'm having. I'm very happy with my Soliloquy 5.3s but seem to have a hard time with vocals or instruments that should be centered...they seem to want to exist to the right of center. I can somewhat correct this by toeing in the right speaker more than the left(I tend to toe speakers in toward the listening spot), but this seems more like a bandaid than a real fix and doesn't fully correct the problem. Moving the right speaker back doesn't seem to help either. Here's the wierd part. When I switch the speakers I still get the same result. I would have expected the center image to shift to the left, but it still skews to the right. I've recently had other speakers in my system and don't have this problem, so I don't think it's the electronics. Also, this happens regardless of what room the speakers are in, so it doesn't appear to be just a room thing, and I've tried different cables as well to no avail.

This is driving me nuts, so I hope you guys have some thoughts or insights and your help is GREATLY appreciated.

Tim
soix
I've got one other possible cause- it could be that your left ear needs to be cleaned. Jay
I think it's most likely a room thing, even though you say it doesn't happen with other speakers and happens in other rooms. Perhaps the Soliliquy's have a radiation pattern that is susceptible to whatever the room problem is, and perhaps the other room you tried happens to have similar characteristics.

The most likely culprit is a reflection or diffraction to the side of the right speaker. Imagine you put a mirror up against the wall to the right of the speaker, located so that as you look at the mirror you see the tweeter. The mirror is at the first sidewall reflection point. Pay particular attention to absorbing or diffusing the sound at that point.

Another possibility is a diffracting surface between the speakers, like a widescreen TV or something.

Are there any diffracting discontinuities to the right of the right speaker? Like the edge of a bookshelf, or a table, or a door frame? If so, try covering the feature up with a towel and see if that helps. Also, is there a doorway or other "hole" behind the right speaker? That would also tend to pull the image in that direction. In that case, the fix requires a bit more experimentation.

You might make sure that there are no screw heads sticking up around the tweeters, just to eliminate that possibility. A screw head is small, but close to the tweeter it actually interacts with a sizeable portion of the tweeter's output.

One final question - do the sibilants - the "sssss" sounds - seem to come from the same point in space as the rest of the vocalist's voice? If the sibilants are off to one side, that will pull the image over. Possible causes are a high frequency imbalance, which you seem to have eliminated, and/or reflection or diffraction of the highs. If the two speakers sound the same (placed side-by-side with a mono source, switching back and forth) then it's most likely a room thing.

Good luck!
Guys, the dude says he's tried other speakers -- w/out the problem. Logically then, it shouldn't be room related...

Acssavings, have you tried any of this out? I'd be intereseted in results.
Cheers!
I have slight off-center imaging due to room asymmentry, even though I listen in the nearfield, and resort quite successfully to a balance-control tweak to pull the image a bit. As the thread-head states he tried the system in a different ROOM with the same asymmetrical results, I guess we have to assume the problem is electrical. Maybe the pre or amp outputs are unbalanced? 1/2 dB would be enough to pull the image, correct? A leaky old cap in my old NAD amp resulted in such an imbalance. 1/2 dB difference in sensitivity is pretty common with speakers, but that's already been ruled out, eh? Well, good luck, and let us know what it turns out to be!