is too large a room no good?

Room size is a componenet of your system, no less important that any other piece of equipment. Even the best stereo will sound awful in the wrong room. this topic is almost always ignored in discussion threads on "what is better, this speaker or that" etc. I suggest you research the archives on "listening room", or "golden ratio". It explains the relationship quite well. If you're serious about "balancing the room" you will want to add some form of treatments in and around the immediate "critical listening position". I have a very comfortable living room, about 26' x 17' x 9', but the size is all wrong. Hence I added large portable (calapsable) absorbers behind my chair which essentially cut the room in half. Put a thick rug in front of the speakers and greatly improved the sound. Cara makes a free software program that analyzes your room properties and tells you how to fix. not sure of the web address right now, but I'm sure a google search will find it for you. Best of luck.

Hey emalist, this is a site that can give you a little technical edge.

http://www.hunecke.de/en/calculators/room-acoustics.html
jb

Clements system does sound better than mine. Perhpas having less to do with room size and more to do with the fact that he is using the behold digital crossover and tri-amping the speakers (2 behold amps!) He is also using the 18" inch to my 15 inch version.

On to room size. The main difference i have come to grips with is with intamacy.
smaller rooms seem to allow for deeper focus into the nooks and crannies of the sound field. boundry walls, if properly treated create a re-enforcement or containment which adds to the ability to render micro focus.

The one area i feel i may have it over the smaller room is with scale.given the right recording, I can achieve near perfect sense and impact of a live performance as far as imaging, sound staging and dynamics are concerned.

Not all big rooms are created equal of course. My room is 33x60x14. An 20x24x10, which was my old room size was nearly perfect, embracing the best of both worlds. Best of luck, Greg

Gregger,

I think you nailed the room size issue pretty good. ITs pretty straightforward really.

Large rooms, properly utilized provide a grander sense of scale. Smaller rooms provide a more intimate listening environment where you can focus more on details and listen into the "nooks and crannnies" of what's going on in the recording.

The Goldilocks room?

Very small rooms = bad. Period. There is no such thing as a great sounding very small room. Good or Bad is possible with "small" rooms but never great. Too many close reverberations give a highly cluttered sound and listening in a near field position (less than 3 feet from speakers is only a wee bit better than headphones). Besides finding a sitting position away from a wall becomes a challenge. A diagonal speaker set up with the listener closer to the center of the room (but obviously not precisely at the center) usually works best in a very small room (get the listener and reflected speaker sound as far away or delayed in time from walls as possible). This is the same reason why open headphones always sound better than headphones with acoustic isolation (cups).

Large domestic rooms/spaces can be great to good but are very rarely bad (again a lot depending on dimensions and reflectivity of the surfaces will determine how great it is) Up to 50 foot dimensions seem to work well. Then long delayed echoes can start to be a headache.

Giant rooms can sound good to awful - again depending on the space. For example, a low ceiling in a large space sounds terrible and highly reflective surface in a very large space can lead to deeply disturbing long time coherent reverberations from any large flat surfaces - such as an auditorium, gymnasium, or double story windows in a giant North American style open living room (as much as possible sound should be directed into the room away from the windows and listening position well away from windows in this case).

A small room being better than a large room is extremely rare. This is because sound travels and loses energy with square of distance(6 db drop in intensity with each doubling of distance). Furthermore a better separation in time will help inteligibility of sound.

The Goldilocks room is actually not too big and not to small - it is just right - but then you probably guessed that! FWIW - Thick Carpet is as near as dammit the best thing since sliced bread when it comes to any room!!