Can a speaker "overpower" a room?

FrantzM

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Hi


Can a speaker overload a room? Is there such a thing? I can understand a speaker being physically too big for a room . I can also understand the can also understand a room where the distribution of modes is such that a speaker with substantial bass excites too many of these modes. I can also understand a room being too small for the drivers to well integrate at the listening position. I am not however sure that any speaker can "overpower" a room because of its output capabilities ....
What does this mean for you, people and why should that be the case?

Opinions welcome.

And Happy Holidays to All!!
 

JackD201

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Hello my friend Frantz :) I think if one isn't judicious with the use of his volume control, like when available headroom is used as sustained output, it is more than just a possibility. The bigger question is, in this day and age, what get's overpowered first, the room or it's occupants!

Merry Christmas to you and all you love too buddy! :)
 

Bruce B

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I'd almost go as far to say a properly built/treated room can handle "any" speaker.
 

fas42

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My slant would be, a properly built system won't overpower any room, irrespective of volume. If the system is not right, there will be too much audible distortion, and your mind will cry "uncle!" well before the room becomes a problem. As Basspig demonstrates, you can have immense volume capabilities, and if that translates to extremely clean sound your brain won't have any trouble assimilating it. As with live sound: a player in the middle of an orchestra, or big band in full cry withstands tremendous levels of complex acoustic sound pressures without great drama; provided it is not sustained over significant periods so ear damage starts to figure in the equation.

So should it be in a domestic listening area: I've experienced high levels of clean sound plenty enough times to be confident to say that it is always the system as a gestalt, as a combination, not being clean enough that can lead one to say that the room is overloading. IMO, the reality is that your head is overloading, trying to sort out inaccurate, high level sound.

Frank
 

FrantzM

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Hello my friend Frantz :) I think if one isn't judicious with the use of his volume control, like when available headroom is used as sustained output, it is more than just a possibility. The bigger question is, in this day and age, what get's overpowered first, the room or it's occupants!

Merry Christmas to you and all you love too buddy! :)

Jack

This thread was inspired by a mention that you made of your room being maybe too small for the Vr-11. I am with Bruce that a well designed room should handle any speaker. within the constraints of distance to the driver for them to blend ... I haven't see you room in person but through the pictures, I am certain it can handle any speakers thrown in it ...
 

JackD201

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Actually the reason I said that is that I would have to change the furniture lay out to get the optimal listening distance. That and that if you look at the pics, I have HVAC soffits that will be far to close to the tops of the 7' 4" towers so there's a physical height issue that leads to width issues making very large speakers like the Arrakis, 11 Mk2s and quad tower systems like MM7s and Genesis 1s tight fits. I also think my room could handle them at normal, even raunch levels but having heard them in Jim's room with the 14' ceilings and 8m width, I'd be spending a whole lot of money on loudspeakers and putting them in a room that won't allow them to be at their best. It would be like comparing the Arrakis in Andy's room compared to them in Jeff's. I'd wager they were closer to their potential in Andy's room. :)

My room is also not built to standards as high as Puget Sounds. I've been able to rattle lighting fixtures with just the VR-9s, not that some silicone couldn't fix that. LOL. Being a venue simply for entertainment, sound transmission was not as high a priority as it would have been if I were doing professional work so I opted to save quite a bit of scratch by foregoing full room within a room construction. It's "semi" in that all walls are insulated double walls and the ceiling is suspended (box type not hung) but the floor isn't. I also didn't put soundlock doors. I want people to know I'm in my bunker.

Then there's Mark Weiss. He of falling plaster and cracking floors! He's surely proved that you can actually damage a room if you really try! :) If I put a rotary sub in my room and cranked it I wouldn't be surprised if not just my lights fell off but my fillings too.

My standards are, shall we say, a bit lower. If my ears give up before the room does, I'm good with that.
 
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fas42

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Actually, Jack, you haven't mentioned lately how your updated speakers finally stabilised: from what you were saying earlier this so-called driver blending should be less of a problem for you now, as compared with before. So how goes it in that sense?

Frank
 

JackD201

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Singing wonderfully Frank. I couldn't be happier. Thanks for asking. :)

It was the weirdest thing. I'm running bi-amp and the MT modules are pretty sensitive. As such it turned out the load is so light that it was taking ungodly amounts of hours to get their amps to warm up. I just happened to be thinking of the time I strapped my 220w hybrid amps to my cousins 99dB sensitive speakers and noted that this sounded cold for about 4 hours then it hit me. I knew it wasn't the speakers because running only 1 pair of blocks, I had no problems. I also had no problems when using tube amps up top. Now I play any vocal heavy CD for 40 minutes or so and after that the system is stabilized and ready to play anything.
 

mep

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Frantz-I used to wonder about overloading a room, but primarily with the bottom end. Prior to reading all of the posts/threads on this forum about the benefits of using multiple subs in addition to your main speakers regardless of their bass capabilities, I would never have dreamed of buying a subwoofer. Each of my main speakers has a 14” sub with two 14” passive radiators powered by an 1800 watt amp.

You pushed me over the edge and I bought a sub. I stuck with Def Tech and bought the Reference sub that has the same 14” sub and same two 14” passive radiators as my main speakers with the same 1800 watt amp. The subs on my main speakers are side firing so I installed the sub so the driver faced forward into the room so the subs are firing from opposite directions. I don’t feel the bass became louder per se, I just felt it became smoother.

For my Christmas present to myself this year, I just ordered another Reference sub and it should be here late next week. That will give me a total of four 14” subs, eight 14” passive radiators, and four 1800 watt amps. I can’t wait to hear what the next sub will bring to the table.
 

Mark (Basspig) Weiss

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Oh, what is it with these threads that 'beg' for my participation, lately? :)

Generically speaking, if the room is flimsy and the walls and windows rattle, the speaker is overwhelming the room. Good-bye fine china closets and glass doors. Hello concrete bunker. Now THERE'S a room that stands up to the sound pressure.

It's all relative to the building, construction, frequency range and SPL.

When I lived in a contractor-built home back in the '60s, serious Hi-fi would have removed all the sheetrock from the ceiling, and loosened it from the walls. When I started building my present home, back during the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was thinking about the tornado that took the roof off my other home, and the possibility of nuke attack, so I used some non-standard construction techniques, which would later prove to be an asset for housing my current sound system. Even so, we still can't have glassware upstairs, as it would break from falling off shelves. Heck, I could feel the floor of my neighbor's livingroom 3/10 mile up the road from here, vibrating under my feet one time when I was there, while running a test of the Bassmaxx subs back home.. I took a walk with the sound level meter and was seeing a recurring 24Hz bass note registering 97dB at my neighbor's house at the end of the dirt road we're on. Overwhelming the room, or the neighborhood? Oh well, it was a test. Thankfully I cannot stand those levels with me in the room.
 

JackD201

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"Over powering a room" is really a case to case thing. They say the best bass trap is an open door or window so in cases where rooms are open plan as in opens up to an adjacent room or stairwell overloading a room will take a lot of bass output and not overload. Chances are all will sound great in room but walk into the adjacent room and the hallway connecting them has just turned into one big port. It will even sound like one. In sealed rooms you'll really need a lot of treatments to convert that energy to heat since there's no place for it to escape to fast enough.
 

JackD201

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Not many rooms are totally bereft of soft surfaces so bass is usually the issue.
 

puroagave

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dipoles that radiate as much energy to the rear can easily overload a smallish room... ceiling scrapers like soundlabs come to mind and no you dont want to put absorbant material behind them and diffussors dont do much. imo, large direct radiating speakers are way easier to place in a smaller room.
 

microstrip

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dipoles that radiate as much energy to the rear can easily overload a smallish room... ceiling scrapers like soundlabs come to mind and no you dont want to put absorbant material behind them and diffussors dont do much. imo, large direct radiating speakers are way easier to place in a smaller room.

I must disagree on this point, as my experience shows some exceptions.

Curiously SoundLabs can sound great in small rooms. A friend of mine had A1s for limited time in a small room (12 x15 feet), while refurbishing his house, and they sounded great , even at loud sound levels . Full range dIpoles suffer from bass cancellation due to the out of phase reflected bass wave if kept close to the back wall and this can help putting them in small rooms. Long time ago I also had the A4 (smaller but the still 3feet wide x 6 feet tall) in a similar room and they sounded great.

I know some people use the Quad ESL63 in even smaller rooms in near field listening with great success. The listening spot is very small, but as the ESL63 emulates a point like source the effect is very interesting - it seems you are listening using headphones with a fantastic soundstage.
 

JonFo

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As an owner of an all electrostatic setup, with large Monoliths anchoring the front, I can attest that one can indeed overpower a room. My definition of 'overpower' is when the spectral balance falls apart due to modal ringing at various frequencies.

Five large electrostats will cause serious modal ringing in an untreated room. I know, as I built my custom room for them, so size was idealized for these specific speakers, yet the results were not that great at high volumes. Much of that was due to mid and high-frequency energy bouncing around the room in an uncontrolled fashion causing massive comb filtering and the ringing at specific frequencies. Not good.

So over the years I measured, planned and tweaked the room acoustics until the speakers no longer overpower the room and I can play at very loud volumes and it is very clean and balanced.

My system has 72 square feet of radiating surfaces (ESLs + dynamic woofers and sub), so putting energy into the room was not the problem, managing resonances at all frequencies sure was. And with the powerful IB sub, bass modes were also significant, but now tamed due to treatments and Audyssey Pro.

So while a speaker might overpower a room, that can be mitigated by adapting the room acoustics appropriately.
 
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Phelonious Ponk

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FWIW, I think being too close to very tall (tweeters/mids significantly above your head when seated) 3 or 4-way speakers creates continuity and scale issues in the mids and particularly the trebles. It ain't just about bass. If your speakers are 6 feet tall, and by the time you get them far enough away from the walls they're only 6 - 8 feet apart, and you're only sitting 6 - 8 feet back, it's just not a natural presentation, period. MHO, YMMV. It is a mystery to me why so many people have trouble embracing the idea that scaling speakers to the room is just common sense. It goes so far that someone the other day was swearing his big towers worked as near field monitors, which makes no sense. When this subject comes up, I always feel like I've walked into a roomful of Franks.

Audiophiles confuse me. :)

Tim
 

mep

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Tim-If you live in a telephone booth, you probably shouldn’t have large speakers. I think we can agree on that. If you have a ridiculously small room, you shouldn’t have ridiculously large speakers. And the inverse is true too. If you have a large room, you shouldn’t have tiny speakers and expect room-filling sound with realistic scaling of voices and instruments. There’s a happy medium lurking in there somewhere.
 

garylkoh

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For my Christmas present to myself this year, I just ordered another Reference sub and it should be here late next week. That will give me a total of four 14” subs, eight 14” passive radiators, and four 1800 watt amps. I can’t wait to hear what the next sub will bring to the table.

Congrats, Mark. More subs (if they are good ones like the DefTech) are for better bass, not more bass. I think that you'll get to the point of diminishing returns after about 5 or 6 subs..... When you get the next sub, try it out at different heights too - like up near the ceiling behind the listening seat.

I was called crazy when I did the latest Genesis 1 with twenty-four 12-inch woofers. But not after you've heard one live and compared it to the old Genesis 1 with "just" twelve woofers. They certainly need a very large room - width for placement, and depth for listening distance (you from the speakers and you from the wall behind your head). However, I wouldn't say that they will over power a room if the room is large enough. Certainly construction is important because you can literally feel the walls of the room "bulge" when all 24 woofers hit a big note.
 

garylkoh

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FWIW, I think being too close to very tall (tweeters/mids significantly above your head when seated) 3 or 4-way speakers creates continuity and scale issues in the mids and particularly the trebles. It ain't just about bass. If your speakers are 6 feet tall, and by the time you get them far enough away from the walls they're only 6 - 8 feet apart, and you're only sitting 6 - 8 feet back, it's just not a natural presentation, period. MHO, YMMV. It is a mystery to me why so many people have trouble embracing the idea that scaling speakers to the room is just common sense. It goes so far that someone the other day was swearing his big towers worked as near field monitors, which makes no sense. When this subject comes up, I always feel like I've walked into a roomful of Franks.

Audiophiles confuse me. :)

Tim

+1

There's always a minimum distance before a multi-driver loudspeaker will "converge". I too have difficulty convincing a customer that one of my cheaper speakers will work better for him because of his listening position/room size. When with a dealer, I get a dirty look because the dealer wants to sell a more expensive speaker.

Then there are those audiophiles who refuse to buy a cheaper speaker than their current one because the more expensive one would obviously be better. The more expensive one is likely to be larger, and have more drivers, and if their current loudspeaker is already too large and has too many drivers to integrate at their sitting distance of 8 feet (note, I didn't say listening distance), then their "upgrade" would make things worse.
 

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