Designing a system for a small listening room
Author:  Jeff Jordan
Novice series article 1 of 2

Happy New Year to all! And what better way to bring in the new millennium than with good sounding tunes!  Not all of us devoted audiophiles live in huge mansions, thus space can have a significant limiting factor on the sound equipment we choose.  For example, I live on the top floor only of a 100-year-old character house.  My listening room is small with dimensions of 13’ x 12’.  I'm on the top floor right below the roof, both my widthwise walls begin to taper forward at a 60 degree incline starting at about 3 feet above the floor. Unfortunately this limits my walking space in the room and limits the height of speakers I can use.

The biggest advantage to my listening room is not having any parallel surfaces.  This helps with not having unwanted reflections, what is known to recording studio buffs as "flutter echo" (the high frequency sound reflected off of right angle corners.) One way to check if you have flutter echo in your listening environment is to clap your hands together hard and listen for a high frequency spitting noise. If you do hear phenomenon get some felt or foam and place in the corners of your room where the walls come together. Experiment with different sizes of felt or foam and placement until the reflected spitting noise ceases to exist. It is best to have your room as quiet and dead sounding as possible. The harder the surface of walls or furniture the more unwanted reflections you will have and the more you will be listening to your room rather than your music. Glass is a big no-no. Close your blinds or curtains or find a way to cover glass when you sit down for serious listening.

Another advantage of having a small room such as mine is you get a certain level of intimacy with the music that is usually lost with larger listening environments. You also have less space that is interacting with the direct sound from your speakers. You can use low power triode tube amplifiers without the need to worry about whether  7-8 watts being enough power to fill the room with sound. You needn't spend multi-thousands of dollars on big megawatt amplifiers. For those of you that have parallel walls I highly recommend going to www.cardas.com. The people at Cardas Audio, who make great speaker and interconnect cables, have a proven formula for setting up speakers. Click on they’re "Insights" header and go to room setup and they will help explain room nodes or the frequency where speakers and parallel walls interact.

If your room is like mine with side walls not running in parallel (or you have shelves and/or a couch in the way) you may want to try the equilateral triangle rule of 8 feet. That is, try and start by spreading your speakers 8 feet apart with your listening position 8 feet back, forming a triangle. 8 feet is a good standard that a lot of speaker manufacturers strive for…listening in your environment will be the ultimate deciding factor. Try spreading your speakers apart to achieve the widest soundstage you can without creating a hole in the middle effect. Listen to some well-recorded/known music to assist you. While small rooms convey more listener involvement it is all too easy to overload the room with bass if you use very large speakers.

The first speakers I tried in my room were the Thiel CS2.2, known for serious bass, but sounded boomy and unmusical in my smaller room.  After much contemplation I settled on Thiel's smaller brother the CS1.2, which have proved to be the most perfect all around speaker for my room. (They are now in a later incarnation known as the CS1.5)  Standing just a couple of inches short of 3 feet tall they fit nicely under the roof of my slanted walls and provide great overall sound.  They are a small 2-way design with a 6.5-inch woofer and a 1-inch metal dome tweeter. They fill the room completely and effortlessly with good bass extension (never sounding boomy) and are quicker in the bass than larger speakers with excellent sound staging and imaging capabilities. While you can drive these speakers with just about anything, they prefer a little extra current, therefore I drive them with a YBA Integrated amplifier which works quite well in most areas providing more than enough power.  This in turn is driven by an YBA CD3a cd player as my main digital source component. After I broke the amplifier and speakers in, I played with speaker positioning for quite some time. I keep the baby Thiel's facing forward all the time with no toe in (toe in gives extra focus on specific instruments but kills the lateral width of the soundstage). Because my room is so small I initially had problems bringing them forward from the back wall. The closer to the back wall increases bass response but diminishes the soundstage, imaging, and soundstage depth. I found the best compromise at 2.5 feet out from the back wall and 7 feet apart. (That is as wide as I could go without interference from the sidewalls.) Since my speakers are designed to be phase correct (sounds arriving at correct time in space) optimum phase and time alignment is provided for a seated listener who is at least 8 feet back or more from the speaker. My personal "sweet spot" is exactly 9 feet back, dead center against the back wall. Everything locks into focus when I'm in my sweet spot.

My rack of equipment which houses my amp, cd player, etc. is centered between my speakers while pushed as far back against the wall as to not intrude on the lateral soundstage. As a small and worthwhile tweak I have my sidewalls covered with thin linen cloth. This prevents early reflections from the speakers and gets rid of mild glare that would be imposed by the hard surface of the wall. You can go all out and get creative with fixtures but I find simpler the better. It doesn't have to look bad either. All in all I'm very happy with the sound I get in my room. It verges on being dead quiet and really lets the music pour out of the speakers with a seamless sound stage. With well-recorded music the speakers disappear and I'm left with nothing but beautiful music!

Happy Listening!
Jeff Jordan

 At The Speaker Company, one can find the suitable quality book shelf speakers that compliments your listening room.