First of all I need to say, it is pleasant to be in a forum with such in-depth replies. Refreshing to be talking to people who know their stuff and have a good sense of humour.
Also why I don't use speakers as a reference system other than in my car, although that's only "reference" in the sense that I invested on a processor for that car so as I won't get vocals in front of me in an asymmetrical soundstage. And I can line my car with Dynamat, any other surface I can't are at least symmetrical on both sides apart from the steering wheel, but I couldn't block out the windows in my house.
Speaking of shelves, I actually use them to my advantage in my home office where I have mini fullrange speakers pushed into the shelf space behind where my laptop is. Imaging apart from getting enough left right panning vs the laptop speakers or a single chassis BT speaker sucks, but the trade off is I get more bass. In your case, it sounds dull and boring, but if you took those out of the shelf and drove them with a NAD D3020 (as I heard them together), they'll still be something like a Grado SR80 or SR60, at which point you might hear a lot less bass.
And this is kind of like everything else in audio - there are always trade offs. Even engineers have to work with those trade offs. Small 2-way speakers image better in smaller rooms because large, multiple driver speakers will have time alignment issues as the distance from your head to the tweeters will vary vs the midwoofers, and the bass drivers. Focal can angle them so the drivers set above and below the center line are moved slightly closer to the listener, but that still doesn't take into account every possible variance like where you listening chair is. If you order these there will actually be a crew to assist the buyers, although people buying such speakers tend to need them less due to knowing what they need to do to get the right sound, but need them more because
holy hell they'll do the heavy lifting and then there's no moving these around after that.
That is actuallly not Frodo Baggins.
As for the quality of my shelves, well that is a definite weak point in my setup. Speakers are on thin shelves with some nasty reflective side shelves. On a scale from 1-10 how much does that effect the SQ ? I will definitely need to improve in this respect.
There's your most likely problem. These aren't failed marketing stunts if they're being used in a manner that they totally aren't even designed for, ie, basically putting them in a small chamber blowing out. it's hard to give a number on that but it can potentially be a 10. The rest of the room might still be a problem otherwise, but the sound output is already screwed. Bass reflections bounce around in there making them sound dull along with resonances masking hard bass hits, its sound doesn't radiate outwards into the room as intended and thus it can't even begin to image a soundstage properly, etc.
That's like pulling a failed marketing stunt by having Andrea Bocelli sing into a sewer line with the audience standing at the main output pipe going into the sea.
It is my burning desire to argue a point here on speaker positioning and the customers point of view. I am seeing it as a value-diminishing factor if speakers are highly dependable on positioning. Think of the value for money as such (though we are in a world where generally you get what you pay for with its up and downsides that have been possibly compromised). Take a speaker that sounds only as promised no matter where you place it and a speaker that delivers only if its certain distance from several points, toe-in angles, height and isolation etc. I do get a lot of value with my all-sound-good speaker and very little from the placement sensitive one. Now, it’s been possible to create such speakers therefore I do not see what obstacle it creates in terms of R&D.
Yeah but where I'm coming from is
physics. Even as somebody from the social sciences, which is like your POV as a customer, I wouldn't use sociology, political science, or economics to override physics, which would be like claimingclimate change is a farce because a lot of people think so.
The reality there is that, like climate change, you can't just override the laws of physics. Some speakers will image better in more positions, true,
but that isn't something that comes free. For example, there's the Duevel Jupiter. It's an omnidirectional speaker where the midwoofer fires upward into a wave guide and a tweeter that fires downward onto a complimentary wave guide. All it does for imaging though is that you have a wider sweet spot, ie, even if you sit slightly off-center - like if it's a his+hers seating in the audio room, you'd still be able to hear the vocals dead center between the two speakers, like if an acoustic band was playing there and the vocalist was still singing there in the middle of the stage.
As much as it improves on that, it still can
not override physics, and on a speaker like that, room size is even waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more critical. Since they're omnidirectional, you have more soundwaves emanating outwards 360deg all around the speakers, so these have to be well over 1M away from the rear
and side walls, otherwise you get a lot of reflections. Even lining the walls with acoustic material isn't going to solve that on its own if the speakers are just too close to the walls (regardless of how the Duevel Venus looks in House's apartment and clinic, if you've ever seen that show). On top of that, the wave guides need to be properly shaped or they won't work properly (again, you can't just override physics), which adds to the development costs, which is why even the cheapest Duevel Planets still cost around $800.
This is why I put up all those examples -
you can not just override physics (or chemistry). I can't drive or ride like on city streets like I'm on the track and call Porsche a marketing stunt when I flip it over the center island, Ducati when I get decapitated on a lamp post, Masamoto when I use a 2.0mm at the thickest part of the heel (and tapers down to paper thin at the tip) to try to cleave through a chicken thigh and chip the edge or try to rock chop parsley like a long-bellied Wusthoff (which also has a lower ROckwell hardness rating, which need constant honing, unlike how Japanese knives don't need honing but will take more time sharpening due to how stiff the steel is) and break the tip, or cook an egg (or anything, really) on a Matfer Bourgeat or DeBuyer without properly polymerizing a coating of vegetable oil to make a slick surface that also protects it from rust.
Basically the client having to dance around the product to meet it’s requirement is a typically European service mentality. Now, the US mentality towards customers os evolved around the customers needs and obstacles he may face.
Yeah but American service and customer mentality has lawyer-induced warning signs to idiot-proof everything. Regardless of how one McDonald's exceeded the manual's stated coffee temperature, why the hell would one drive around with their hot coffee - again, regardless of temperature - between her legs? I wouldn't even put my iced frappucino near my dong, not out of fear of getting frostbite, but it will predictably mess up my upholstery and carpeting when my thighs move, which is kind of necessary for, you know, driving. That's the reality of American service and customer mentality.
At the same time, can you find an actual American speaker that will automatically get around all obstacles? At a minimum you need to buy something that isn't actually American, ie, Bose, and have it professionally installed and let them handle the headache of making it work in the room. Or maybe buy American, like JBL. But chances are you're going to hire someone from Magnolia to get it installed, and chances are they'll still tell you to not put it on the shelf, if not quote you the price to have an acoustic engineer rework the entire room. A small room can sound great, like with nearfield set ups (JBL also has studio monitors), but even speakers intended for that purpose need some acoustic materials on the walls. You can try Magnepan too - great speakers from the USA - but if you look through their websites they'll have a lot of disclaimers about how your room needs to be to make them work, as well as how much amplifier you need, which, in true American fashion, is kind of like a coffee cup that lawyers have made so that they have to say, "CAUTION - COFFEE VERY HOT!!!" so you don't burn your dong and balls while driving with the coffee next to your crotch.
Many even have lots of fun going through all these obstacles to get better sound out of their equipment. Everyone is free to believe in whatever strategy but these two scenarios are pretty much reality. The market knows that, therefore not really bothering about user friendliness, saving huge money on not having to think about speakers effectivity to deliver that promised sound.
That "pretty much reality" is actually the second being one of the following:
1. The speakers image well
enough in a less than perfect room, and that room just happens to not have the kind of obstacles that would be a problem
2. The obstacles aren't a shelf around the speaker, for those who actually care about imaging. While not everyone is in a dedicated audio room, some have them on stands in the living room, and the only "obstacle" is a coffee/magazine table and a couple of soft (ie sound absorbent) fabric lined sofas.
3. The customer paid a professional installer to deal with the room, effectively not having to be forced to endure the work around that others actually enjoy. They don't actually - they're after the best sound, which is what they actually enjoy,
but they don't have the money, same way that people install their own cars' audio systems because the fabrication of the panels that will angle the speakers can cost several thousand dollars if a pro has to do them, or build their own PCs including all the tubing for liquid cooling the CPU, chipset, VRM, RAM, GPU, VRM, and VRAM, because if they paid some pro to do it, it will probably a) cost more than the components that b) it will only be worth it if your components are the best to begin with and can be overclocked to perform well beyond manufacturer official specs given a custom liquid cooling solution, which basically means starting with about $5,000 on a 12 core Intel i9 Extreme, an X399 motherboard, NVidia Titan V, etc, and then blowing another $2,000 on the radiators, fans, pump, and case, then another $1,000+ to have some other guy build it.
I see the trend changing with Kef taking this issue seriously.
That point source design is still not going to override physics as much as omnidirectional speakers can't. All the point source speaker will do is eliminate the time alignment issues when you sit a a height that makes for enough of a variance in the distance from your head to the midwoofer vs to the tweeter. If you use a tower,
even the KEFs that use a point source midwoofer+tweeter, there's still going to be the same problem of the possibility of that variance coming up but this time from your head to the coaxial driver vs to the midbass driver/s. Which, again, is because you can not just override physics - engineers just try to get around them.
You might notice that none of that addresses how much less they'll be affected by putting them in a chamber like that shelf.
I believe that it would be more transparent to have a standard measurement for sound quality deviation taking into account factors responsible for the effectivity of sound quality. This measurement would not speak about whether it sounds great or not but how effectively the speaker delivers that SQ in volumetric spaces. Maybe some similar parameters that exist give insight on SQ effectivity?
Yes but what standard equates to
all the variances? You're not escaping the aforementioned variances by having that. If anything this is just more "CATUION - COFFEE VERY HOT HOT HOT!!!" American legal system-induced consumer relations, and even then, you'd still have the equivalent of driving with a cup of coffee between the thighs incident.
To cut to the chase, I have looked into all your suggestions and somehow ended up heavily straring at the Dynaudio Emit M10. Your comments on the various effects other speakers would have in combination with the Rega Brio was very useful to get on the right path. Do you think with those I have a chance to solve this puzzle of decent soundstage at the necessary budget. I mean if it’s not going to be a revelation to the Q3020 i will step up my budget and rethink myself into higher territory. What’s expensive and inconvenient is to get speakers which are only slightly better.
I'd just get stands first (get one with a higher load capacity and larger plate in case you get bigger speakers) and put those speakers off the shelf. If the imaging improves and you can hear everything better, then that's one problem solved. Next is the tonality - if you still don't like the Brio R and Q 3020 on that, you can look into replacing either, and the stands will still work with any other speaker.
If you really want to keep the speakers on the shelf, just get some Bose or whatever and use it for listening when you can't or don't want to use headphones. For headphones, try to get an AKG K1000 - there's no better imaging among headphones than that.
To me having a strong soundstage as opposed to a sluggish one, is a huge difference.
OK, I'm getting confused. While "strong" can mean "better" soundstage in most aspects, "sluggish" is never a word used to descrie soundstage. Soundstage is how it projects sound with spacing between the instruments - vocals dead center, preferably pushed away from the listener with the percussion pushed farther back (other speakers push the vocals forward, and do it enough to put space between the vocals and the drums) - and you don't look at real estate and describe a cheap Manhattan or London flat as "sluggish." Are we on the same page here?
If you're talking about the tonality, ie, the Rega making it sound so warm and relaxed to the point that the sound comes out kind of "slow" and "sluggish," ie, like how the bass beat on the intro of Feist's
One Evening can sound on an extremely warm system where the bass notes bloom slowly and doesn't fade out vs Focals, Grados, or Sennheisers and AKGs on a proper amplifier where the bass has a sudden hit, fades out, then the sudden hit of the succeeding note, repeat until the next movement, then that's not soundstage or imaging, that's tonal balance (some even misattribute that to some amps having a faster slew rate, but you'd have to have a reeeeeeeeeeeeeally crappy amplifier or preamplifier for that to be the problem). If it boosts the bass enough then the part where the bass note is supposed to fade out remains too loud that it melds with the next note. On the opposing end of that you have something like small Focals or Grado headphones where the boosted upper bass and lack of deep bass makes for bass notes that seem like they're going faster as you get a hard bass hit and barely any of the remaining reverberation of the bass drum before the next hit.
Note that while this might be tonality this can be caused by any number of things: a too warm speaker driven by an amp that intentionally alters the sound can be one, the other can be - again -
the room. Why don't we put speakers close to the walls? It isn't just going to screw up imaging by putting the bass too far forward, it does that by boosting the bass. Put the speakers too close to the corners and you do even more. Put the speakers on a shelf, ie, now you practically have four corners (top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right) instead of one tall corner. You're not even supposed to make a subwoofer enclosure that is a perfect cube in the interior, but now you've basically put your speakers that are producing the more critical parts of the music - ie, practically all of it apart from low bass - into an open cube box.
I can only positively believe rega brio and q3020 are a mismatch.
If it was purely just tonality you're concerned with and not so much the imaging/soundstage then there's the likelihood that the Brio R
is contributing to that, and that a D3020 might help. I still say "
might," because your speakers are still on that shelf, and chances are it could be doing even more than the Brio R, because when I compared a bunch of Regas to say Arcams (CDPs to my headphone amp and headphone, CDPs and amps to speakers), they only made Norah Jones sound like she has sinusitis, not make the bass beat on Feist's
One Evening sound like the song is slower.
I’ve ordered the Hifiman e400, let’s see in a few days if I can at least stop looking for pleasantly sounding headphones. The DT990 is seriously only bearable for 5 min until it fades away into a flat wall of treble and midrange smacked viciously into your glowing ears ! More to come...
I still can't find an "E400."
If you mean the
RE400, then depending on what you plug that into, output impedance might be a problem and you might get the same problem, or the opposite.
If you mean the
HE400i, that one's got a flat response from 1000hz to 10hz, which some people perceive as "great, accurate bass" (which it is) while others take it as "where's the bass?!" (these people expect bass to always sound like a Cadillac rollin round in tha hood, with them 22in Spinnerz and four 12in Audiobahn woofaz in tha back). You very likely won't get that glare on the boosted upper midrange and treble on the DT990,
but there's still the matter of its relatively low sensitivity, so practically anything you hook it up to short of a good headphone amp or a decent enough DAP is not going to give it enough current. It's not just about going loud, but going loud with clean power so it won't be "sluggish" or have non-existent bass.
