Dunlavy SC-IVa Set up help

Dunlavy's like to be seperated by a fairly large margin. Keep this in mind, along w/Newbee's advice.

Hi, I have a pair of SC-V sigs, in a 23 x 14 x 8 room set up on the short wall. Speaker baffle 40" from rear wall 28 in. from side wall. These figures may be of some use, or none at all. It all depends on the surfaces in the room , furnishing, doors, passthroughs, carpet, or hardwood, or concrete floors etc... if you would like, shoot me an email

Scot

Nice setup. I've moved my 4a's around a lot and never could get them to sound right along the short wall, however, my room is not as deep as yours.(13X18) The guy i bought them from had them on the short wall with the sidewalls treated and they sounded pretty good. His room was about 24 feet long and he did have them pulled out several feet from the back wall just as newbee specified. Just remember as far as placement goes, these speakers need to be at least 9-10ft apart and the listening position back 10-11ft for everything to come into focus. Toe-in is mandatory. I started toeing them until I could no longer see the wood on the side. From my listening position all I see is speaker grill cloth. Treating the floor is a plus too. even having berber carpet, placing a large rug on top of that really helped things. A couple of things from my manual - It is best not to have the speakers the same distance from the back wall to the side wall and for the most accurate reproduction of bass long wall placement is the best setup. You could try your home theater against the long wall, mine works great set up like this. (see pic) In this configuration you can push the speakers almost all the way to the back wall. Since they are a sealed box design, they dont have the bass overhang problems that ported designs do when close to the back wall. If you go with the long wall setup you probably wont need to treat the first order reflection points but you will need to treat a 4x6 area directly behind the listening position. I hung up a small rug. It looks good too. Hope this helps.

Your short wall is simply too little space for this speaker. With the wide horizontal dispersion from this type of array, you're experiencing side wall reflections. This alters the in-room response and tonal balance. Once you reduce the side wall reflections by moving the speakers closer together and / or toeing them in away from the side walls, you've now lost the room reinforcement that the woofers were designed to work with. Now the bass sounds weak and anemic. You're in a lose / lose situation. That's because Dunlavy's weren't designed for short wall placement.

On top of that, these speakers suffer from severe variations in low frequency response from room to room due to the differences in floor to ceiling height. I made a recent post about how to address this problem in this Dunlavy based thread. This solution has a lot of variables to it and you can make it as pretty and / or effective as you like.

If you can't relocate the speakers to the long wall and impliment the type of baffle reinforcement device that i mentioned in that thread, these speakers will never work nearly as well as they could or were designed to in your specific listening area. Properly designed speakers take into account specific room placement in order to achieve optimum results. These are properly designed speakers and they are telling you that the placement / room lay-out isn't optimized for their requirements. Sean
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I wonder what John Dunlavy or some of the people who used to work for Dunlavy (like Drew Rigby) would say about Sean's suggestions. My guess is that they would be horrified.

I also wonder if Sean has ever owned the Dunlavy SC-IV/A. I have, and the speakers gave me spectacular results -- even when set up on the short (15 feet) wall. I used some room treatments, placed them out in the room about three feet and the sound was very good. Also, these speakers are very efficient and do not require monster amps to sound fantastic.