The Larsen 9 Loudspeakers: Ignoring the Room Around Them

[tmallin]

Overview

Overall, in my experience, the Larsen 9 speakers provide four main areas of excellence, which even if not totally unique are at least highly unusual and enjoyable:

1. The Larsen speakers seem to erase the second venue effects of the listening room. They ignore my small room acoustics to a unique, unprecedented extent, so much so that even in my small room I think many listeners might be satisfied with and even prefer the sonics without any purposeful room treatment at all. Their presentation is maximally open and large without any such room treatment. I am using acoustic foam room treatment only to eliminate relatively mild slap echo on radio announcer voices and to add further stability and precision to their imaging, particularly at center stage.

2. Their boundary placement design also conveys highly unusual benefits in lower range response. Their placement at the junction of wall and floor amplifies their low bass response so that their relatively small cabinets can provide considerable bass power right down to the very bottom of audible frequencies. The near-floor mounting of the woofer operating only below 300 Hz also eliminates “the usual floor dip” which can rob speakers of output and authority in the crucial orchestral “power range” of 100 to 300 Hz. The Larsens also provide for me unprecedented detail about the texture of bass-through-lower-midrange notes, allowing one to hear bass tunes more easily, better hear life-like moment-to-moment dynamic and tonal changes in the lower ranges, and hear bass instruments as solid 3-D images rather than mere bass rumbles or thumps.

3. Once tweaked by my Lyngdorf TDAI-3400’s Room Perfect equalization, the overall frequency balance from lowest bass to highest treble closely matches that of my AR-303a, thus sharing with that speaker and that speaker alone in my experience, the ability to sound naturally convincing on an extremely wide range of commercial recordings without the need for additional recording-to-recording equalization. Bass is powerful, extended, and a bit elevated, the midrange is very smooth, and the high frequencies are extended enough to yield adequate air while rolling off gently in the top two octaves, preventing any high frequency nastiness from spoiling the suspension of disbelief with most recordings.

4. Last but certainly not least, there is their “non-speaker” sound, hard to describe but easily audible with only a brief initial audition. The sound is untethered from the speaker locations to a degree unique in my small room experience. The sound just exists before you. The Larsen presentation is as through a window on the music, concert hall or otherwise. That window expands and contracts in terms of depth, width, and envelopment from recording to recording, but is always there, regardless of its apparent size or shape. Also always present are a clarity and immediacy without projecting the sound into your listening room or ever sounding overly bright or aggressive. Seems contradictory, I know, but it's always "you are there" rather than "they are here."

Why?

Before acquiring the Larsen 9 loudspeakers I still thought the AR-303a speakers I’ve been using in both my systems are as fine an overall reproducer of a wide variety of recordings as I’ve ever heard in my small audio listening room. But I had long wondered about the Larsen line, especially the model 9.

As I recently stated in a post to my sticky thread on “The 12 Most Significant Loudspeakers of All Time,” one important category of speaker has largely been left out of this entire discussion. That is the category of boundary placement speakers: speakers intended to be placed against at least one room boundary--say the wall behind them--or at the junction of two boundaries, e.g., that wall and floor, or the junction of three boundaries--in a room corner.

Yes, I suppose corner horn speakers like the Klipschorn are an example of this group. But unlike most of the others, the K-Horn and other corner-horn speakers really do not deal well with the very strong early-in-time room reflections which accompany such positioning. This failure is one major cause of the high-frequency stridency K-Horn detractors note.

The list of successful boundary placement speakers is short. To get an idea of which speakers are on this list, read Robert E. Greene's (REG) reviews of the Larsen Model 8 and Larsen Model 9 loudspeakers in The Absolute Sound. He mentions Sonab, Allison, Steinway/Lyngdorf, Tact, and Larsen.

Perhaps the list of successful boundary placement speakers should not be so short. As REG notes, this type of speaker represents a sort of "road not taken" in high-end audio loudspeaker design. He notes:

This creates a challenging situation for a design that works in a way different from the, by now, ensconced forward-radiating box with directivity increasing with increasing frequency that has somehow become a “standard,” whether it should have or not. And such a design as the Larsen Model 9—this is something different. It is also something good. Very good, indeed.

I’ve never really heard any of the speakers on REG’s short list of successful boundary placement speakers. Neither did I hear the Larsen 9 before purchasing them. But I usually agree with REG’s sonic assessment of speakers. And I should note that from what I can tell from online comments by others, those who have heard or owned Allisons and Sonabs generally love them, keep them a long time, and seem to consider them legendary. There is still a lot of active online discussion of Allisons and Sonabs even though these speakers have been out of production for several decades.

REG’s review indicated that the Larsen 9 has fine tonal balance and a unique transparency to the original recorded event. His review also stressed that even without purposeful acoustic room treatment, the Larsen 9, set up as recommended, could basically match or better the degree to which conventional speakers toed in and listened to from the near-ish field in a well-padded room ignore the second-venue effects of your listening room. I figured that combining the Larsen 9 with some acoustic foam room treatment could produce yet more insight into the recorded acoustics than I’ve ever been able to achieve from conventional speakers in my small room.

REG’s review indicated that the Larsen 9 ticks all my primary listening bias boxes. My primary goals in music reproduction can be summed up as: to hear the recorded music and acoustics of the original real or artificial venue, with a natural yet forgiving tonal balance compatible with as many commercial recordings as possible without the use of recording-to-recording equalization, while minimizing the second venue acoustical contributions of my small listening room.

Thus, when the opportunity arose to acquire a used pair of Larsen 9 speakers in fine condition at a good price, I took the plunge.

 

[tmallin]

The Reviews

I have located what I believe are three important reviews of the Larson 9 speakers online. I will quote from the sonic comments in those reviews with which I agree or think need elaboration. The reviews are:

Robert E. Greene (REG) in The Absolute Sound (REG)

Alan Sircom in hi-fi+ (AS)

Barry Jones in SoundStage Australia (BJ)

Also very helpful both for historical background of the designer’s speakers, but also for sonic descriptions of the Larsen sound is REG’s review of the prior top Larsen model, the 8. In addition, I suggest reading the Stereophile review of the Larsen 8.

Sonic Comments from the Reviews

The most striking aspect of the Model 9’s presentation is also one that is hard to explain in specific terms: It sounds very much not like a speaker. In particular, it sounds almost not at all like a speaker in a room. To some extent, sitting really close to ordinary speakers gives you the impression of no longer being in your own listening room. But with the Larsens, the absence of early sidewall reflections and of a delayed backwall reflection really erases your room to a surprising extent. Larsen and his people emphasize the point that the speakers do not need acoustic treatment of the room around them, that they ignore the room on their own. In my experience this is true. You get the very positive effect of an RFZ (reflection free zone) room just from the nature of the speakers themselves, without the need actually to modify your listening room. REG

I experimented quite a lot with both listening position and acoustic foam placement. I think many listeners might prefer the sound of the Larsens in their current placement in my small room without any foam pads at all. These are the only speakers I've ever had in this room that I can honestly say that about. The presentation is the largest, most open that way and the tonal balance is fine with no early reflection midrange or high frequency nasties.

What breaks the spell for me with no padding is the sound of radio announcer voices and the clap track test I've often mentioned, track 4 on this CD. I know from listening via headphones and knowledge of where radio announcers usually are talking from (a small, well-padded studio room) that announcers should not sound like they are speaking in a large reverberant room and I know from listening via headphones that the clap track has no inherent trailing reverb after the sudden, short clap impulse.

Thus, I added just enough foam padding at only the relevant reflection areas to remove this excess reverberation/slap echo from announcers' voices and the clap track. Any more than that amount of acoustic foam padding of the room "closes down" the Larsen 9's presentation too much.

As it turned out, with the Larsens I needed only six of my 2-foot by 4-foot, 4-inch-thick acoustic foam pads to reach this result. Usually, I need sixteen such pads against the walls plus two floor pads to get this result. With the Larsens even four pads was almost enough (removing the floor-to-ceiling padding to the sides, just using a half-high wall damping there). Also, the pads behind the listening position in front of the window were not necessary to remove the slap echo. But they do give me more stable and focused images, especially in the center. Some may not need or even like such a focused imaging effect, but at this point I've not yet overcome my addiction to this perhaps unnatural image focus that has been so easy to achieve via foam padding of the walls with other speakers in the traditional fire-the-speakers-down-the-length-of-the-room orientation.

The Larsen 9 may not present as large an apparent presentation as large flat panel dipoles like Maggies or the Sanders. Also, the Larsen images are not usually very tall. They are taller than the level of the 36.5-inch tall speaker boxes and certainly tall enough to seem like they are coming from right in front of your eyes rather than having to look "down" on the images, as if your were listening to a concert from the balcony rather than from the main floor. But they do not create obviously tall images the way Maggies and the Sanders can easily do.

The Larsen 9 spatial presentation varies A LOT from one recording to another, much more than any other speakers I've had in my room. But these spatial variations are primarily in width, depth, and wrap around envelopment of the stage, not particularly in image height.

Also, at least in my room, the width and depth of the stage can vary quite a bit with seating distance/subtended angle between the speakers. (This is so with other speakers as well, but not so obvious as with the Larsens.) Not only did the bass and warmth response increase as I moved the listening seat closer to the window wall behind me, but the spatial presentation on any given recording changed relative to the equilateral triangle position I started and ended with. Sitting further back made the space a more compact "balloon" shape (which some listeners might prefer) which seemed a bit obviously deeper and certainly obviously less wide than from closer up. The equilateral triangle position increases transparency of the window on the music, however, and reveals more clearly/precisely placed images both side to side and in depth, especially in closed-eyes listening.

Musically, the absence of early reflections makes the sound very clear but also very natural in the sense of sounding like real instruments in real space. This is quite different from the instruments-in-your-listening-room effect often talked about—different and to my mind much better. “You are there” is always better than “they are here” in my book. (REG)

What it really sounds like—this independence of the acoustics of one’s listening room—is not easy to explain in words. But it is unmistakably present. This is one case in which a brief audition, even at a show, will reveal something really striking. You don’t have to listen for days or weeks . A few minutes of listening will show what is going on. (REG)

I have trouble describing the spatial presentation, as did REG in his review. As he said, the Larsens just sound more like the space and instruments you hear at a live concert performance rather than what you are used to hearing from speakers in a listening room. It should be almost immediately obvious when you get to hear them, though, what is so different about their presentation. That window on the performance is always there, regardless of its apparent size or shape. Also always present are a clarity and immediacy without projecting the sound into your listening room. Seems contradictory, I know, but it's always "you are there" rather than "they are here."

The result is a speaker which is surprisingly unaffected by details of placement. The Model 9s are not speakers which have to be moved by fractions of an inch to find a place where they will work. Some positions are, of course, a little better than others, but the speakers work really well in almost any plausible spot of the sort specified—against the wall, reasonably far from the sidewalls, and bingo. No tedious and usually quite unstable maneuverings are required to defeat Allison-effect cancellations and the “usual floor dip,” in Martin Colloms’ phrase. The speaker just works in a most unusually convincing fashion. (REG)

I agree.

The Model 9s are relatively small speakers, but their bass performance is extremely convincing. The absence of the floor dip [i.e., decreased response in the upper bass power range somewhere between 100 and 300 Hz] and the driving of the room from the junction of two boundaries—floor and wall—gives striking definition of bass lines. The bass is truly solid down to below 40Hz with extension yet further down, and it has real definition. One can hear bass lines in complex music in a way that escapes most speakers. Orchestral music has bass that is impressively realistic, much like the actual thing, without boom but with real definition and impact. (REG)

I agree.

 

[tmallin]

The Model 9s sound more “live” than speakers which narrow their pattern with increasing frequency, starting as far down as say 500Hz, as typically happens with narrow-front floorstanders. (REG)

Up to the top octave, the room sound matches the direct arrival very well, and the usual push and tug between room and direct sound is all but eliminated. This contributes a lot to the sense of “non-speakerdom.” And it gives the Larsens a really natural tonal character to my ears. The whole room is alive with uniform balance. (REG)

The Larsen Model 9 is among the most ‘live-sounding’ loudspeakers I’ve heard. Not ‘live’ as in the cabinet resonates, but ‘live’ in terms of that feeling you get when sitting with a group of good musicians playing live in a room. The loudspeaker acts like it isn’t there. Instead, your wall miraculously transforms into an acoustically transparent curtain between you and the musicians. It’s an uncanny feeling and one that’s captivating and invigorating. (AS)

I agree. How this can be without the speakers sounding too bright in any way is hard for me to understand, but this definitely seems accurate. There is more “life” to the room sound, but no edgy brightness and the top octave definitely rolls off a bit or more, as it does with my AR-303a’s.

There is one oddity, or so it seems to me. Namely there is a perceived (by me) excess of energy around 600–650Hz. This shows clearly in the steady-state room sound, though it is less obvious in music material, though still perceptible. But it is easily adjusted if adjustment seems called for.... If you want less 600Hz, just go for some EQ, which is in fact easy to arrange accurately in this case. (REG)

True again. Neither of the other reviews of the Larsen 9 mentions this, but REG’s reviews of both the 9 and 8 mention this oddity. Stereophile’s review of the Larsen 8 also mentions it in John Atkinson’s measurements section and Atkinson says it is quite audible to him. The Stereophile measurements of the Larsen 8 also show this peak in the frequency response graphs.

I briefly tried manually EQing out this peak via the parametric controls of Roon, using a bell curve of minus 5 dB and Q of 3 centered at 650 Hz. Yes, that was indeed helpful in increasing the already fine midrange naturalness of the Larsen 9 sound. But, honestly, I didn’t hear anything amiss until I tried this. With that manual EQ, the 650 Hz bump-up was conspicuous in its absence. Once I ran Room Perfect I very clearly hear that Room Perfect has eliminated a bit of midrange forwardness/honkyness and voices especially sound yet more natural. Comparing the sound of pink noise (I use 2 Hours of Pink Noise via YouTube) with Room Perfect in the Focus position versus the Bypass position in a quick A/B makes the Bypass coloration quite obvious.

The idea of using boundary placement to reduce the influence of the listening room on the sound has been around for a long time and tried in various ways. But it remains rather unusual. All you have to do is look through audio magazines to see that almost all contemporary speakers are really quite a lot alike in their general nature. Some are better than others, and we all have our favorites according to various theories and listening experiences. But there is a considerable sense of “déjà vu all over again.” The Larsens are members of a family, too, in some sense. But their family of boundary-placement speakers is a very much smaller one. The Larsens offer a unique sound that to my ears is unusually true to actual music, and they are unusual, too, in their ease of effective placement in the room. They offer their unique sound with a truly minimal disturbance of domestic life. Whether their unique sound is for you is something you need to experience for yourself. You will have not heard anything else much like the sound—except of course in live music. (REG)

An excellent summing up of my reaction to the Larsen sound and design as well.

 

[tmallin]

These high-performance speakers are perfect for smaller listening rooms. Even when money is not a problem, space can be a premium for city dwellers. Larsen Model 9s work against the rear wall, thereby maximizing floor space. (AS)

The Larsens are visually great for small listening rooms. Putting them against the room’s long wall behind them and firing into the short dimension visually opens up the appearance of the room a lot. Plus much less acoustic foam is needed. Before I was regularly using sixteen 2-foot by 4-foot slabs of 4-inch-thick acoustic foam against the walls, plus the two floor pads. Now I need at most six of the foam slabs against the walls and no floor pads My small room looks so much bigger now!

Larsen mathematically modelled the design to suit boundary room interaction. Where other designs try—and fail—to ignore the room in the development of the loudspeaker, Larsen makes it an intrinsic part of the design. This is why the Model 9 has a woofer close to the floor to engage the floor in the most appropriate manner possible in the room. Placing the mid-woofer diagonally changes the first reflection parameters. (AS)

Then, the tweeter fires further into the room, thanks to its placement at the interface between the two loudspeaker’s top panel surfaces. Finally, two tweeters are firing upwards to create a reverberant field for the upper registers. The whole design simultaneously ‘works the room’ and presents a uniform sound. The absence of rear-wall reflection, the baffle-step frequency moved to a safe place beyond our most discerning hearing region, those sidewall reflections pushed as far as possible… all these things add up to make a loudspeaker that sounds less like a loudspeaker and more like a musical event taking place in your room. (AS)

Yes, but I would clarify the last couple lines of the second quote to say "all these things add up to make a loudspeaker that sounds less like a loudspeaker and more like you are at a musical event." The Larsens never sound like the musicians are in your listening room. Instead, you are listening in the room/hall/artificial environment where they are recorded, or at least looking through a picture window into that space. The Larsens are alway "you are there" speakers, not "they are here" speakers.

First, placement along that rear wall is essential. The loudspeakers work best when firing across the room rather than down, contrasting with most loudspeaker designs. (AS)

While I did not try firing the speakers into the usual long dimension of the room, all three reviews and the manufacturer’s manual state that the speakers are intended to be set up firing across or into the short dimension of the room.

This is the antithesis of loudspeakers that define audiophile performance purely by imaging. The Larsen Model 9 has good imaging, but not in traditional loudspeakers’ pinpoint, precise holographic style. This is good because that imaging style never happens in the real world. Instead, you are aware of a physical musician playing because of the sound’s dynamic range and leading-edge immediacy. (AS)

Yes, but greater imaging precision can easily be achieved in my room by using some acoustic foam panels at strategic spots along the sidewalls and on the wall behind the listener.

The word I wrote most often in the notebook was ‘convincing’. They made a convincing sense of bass depth and force in a small room. Larsen Model 9s were convincingly real-sounding when playing orchestral passages, whether genteel Mozart confections or Mahlerian bloodletting. The tonal balance and the sense of rightness to the sound are also, you guessed it, convincing. It made music sound like convincing and properly balanced real music, whether live or studio recorded. (AS)

A good way to put it, yes.

The Larsen Model 9s do everything well. They laugh at the constraints usually applied to get a big sound in a small room. Instead, they fill the room with good sound: rich, deep bass, a natural and fluid midrange and keenly extended highs. It does everything for every kind of music and does it exceptionally well. (AS)

Another nice summation. I would note, however, with reference to “keenly extended highs” that there is at least a bit of softness to the top octave sound. That is how I like it, preventing most material from sounding too high-frequency aggressive and in that way very similar to the top octave response of my AR-303a speakers.

 

[tmallin]

If the speakers had a personality, it would be a very sure of themselves, self-confident one. There is surprising depth and agility, the sound being far bigger than their size would suggest. (BJ)

Yes, this is a valid observation. While image height is not overly tall, the sound field can be enormous on some recordings.

Reducing the distance between the speakers however will also affect the optimum listening distance from the speakers. Being closer to an equilateral triangle gives a slightly more intimate sound-field and more precise imaging but with a slight trade-off in the level of the lower bass notes. However, the effect was less noticeable with the Larsen 9s than with typical box speakers (BJ)

This is exactly what I found in my room. I recaptured the reduced bass at the equilateral triangle position by running Room Perfect.

The Larsen 9 uses foam discs inserted into the base of the cabinet as feet. This is an unusual but quite effective approach on my timber floor. (BJ)

I totally agree. For years I have used soft interfaces between speakers and other components and their supporting surfaces. To my ears, soft sounds better than spikes, cones, or other “hard” interfaces.

Surprisingly deep, powerful and agile bass. I played a bunch of albums and this one thing, which is often elusive in many systems, was consistent across a range of different musical genres and recordings. In my experience, minimizing room interactions is a most admirable pursuit and tends to normalize the bass avoiding the peaks and troughs that occur on in-room frequency response curves. The result may take a little getting used to as the peaks and troughs can make some recordings sound good (and others sound lackluster), but when the peaks and troughs are minimized you hear what it actually should sound like. (BJ)

Yes, this is also my overall reaction to how the Larsen 9 sounds in the bass.

Detailed imaging. While not the most detailed I’ve ever heard, it was satisfyingly revealing, and achievable from a larger sweet spot than you’ll get from more traditional designs, which is great when there is more than just you enjoying the music. I was never left wanting more. (BJ)

True again. I can move my head as far to the left or right as I can in my listening chair and centered images still stay centered. This is unprecedented in my listening room. Also, as I have the Larsen 9s set up, the imaging is as detailed as I need or want it to be.

Deep soundstage. It was sometimes counter intuitive when opening your eyes after listening with your eyes closed. The effect was particularly noticeable on classical music where the back of orchestra was clearly behind the font wall of the listening room. (BJ)

Yes, on both classical music and other types of music, the soundstage can often extend significantly beyond the wall behind the speakers. This is particularly noticeable in eyes-closed listening. This characteristic varies greatly from one recording to another, just as I think it should for a speaker which is honestly portraying what is actually recorded. Some recordings sound “small,” flat as a pancake with a stage basically a straight line between the speakers. Other recordings reveal a truly vast soundspace in depth, width, and envelopment around the listener. Recordings vary between these two extremes of soundstage characteristics to a degree unprecedented in my prior listening experience.

At least some of the depth, lateral, and envelopment expansion of the soundstage seems to be caused by phasing effects intentionally or accidentally captured during recording or intentionally injected by studio engineering or processing applied by the streaming service. I notice that on recordings where the lateral space seems confined to the distance between the two speakers, intentionally reversing the polarity of one channel via my Lyngdorf TDAI-3400’s controls produces a tremendous lateral and 3-D expansion of the sound field, together with the proverbial “diffuse and directionless” quality of the sound.

However, on recordings where, with both channels of the Lyngdorf connected in phase, the soundstage shows remarkably expanded qualities, reversing the phase of one channel via the Lyngdorf’s controls produces relatively minor changes to the sound field; sometimes barely any change at all is noted. This strongly suggests to me that the remarkably expanded soundstage audible on some recordings via the Larsens is a product of accidental or intentional phase manipulation in the recordings themselves or in the processing applied by the streaming service. The recording channels are at least partially out of phase with each other, producing an expansive quality to the sound even when the channels are nominally connected in phase.

At the upper end of the frequency range, I felt the Larsen 9s were slightly rolled off and this was confirmed in an A/B comparison. The sound was for the most part eminently satisfying but there were a handful of occasions where I felt they lacked a little ‘airiness’ compared to other high-end designs. Having said this, the quality of the upper registers was pristine. There was never any edginess even at very high-volume levels. (BJ)

Yes, this is, to my ears, totally accurate. In this way the highs are quite similar to those I’ve been living with via the AR-303a speakers in this room.

They’re most likely not for the audiophile who has no constraints but rather for those who want a speaker that can perform properly in real world listening environments. In particular within rooms where they can be placed on the longest wall and more than 60 cm from side walls. I glimpsed Nirvana with a distance of 75 cm from the side walls spaced 2.3m apart and a listening distance of 4m from the front wall. (BJ)

While I have a dedicated room and can employ as much or little acoustic treatment as I want, I totally agree that, even without using any acoustic treatment, the Larsen 9s offer listeners the opportunity to come closer to achieving a presentation which ignores the acoustics of their small listening room than any other speakers I’ve experienced.

Perhaps the Larsen 9’s most significant strength is ‘consistency’. I played a diverse range of music throughout the review at a range of volume levels and was never disappointed. They are, in my opinion, extraordinarily well-rounded and well-balanced loudspeakers. (BJ)

“Convincing” and “beguiling” are two other adjectives the reviewers used to sum up their overall reaction to the Larson 9. I agree with all three descriptors.

As you can by now tell if you’ve read this far, I think the Larsen 9 speakers sound great in my room. They sound very natural, with more differentiation among recordings than even the AR-303a’s I was using before, but still with no overbrightness, which is very nice indeed.

 

[tmallin]

Further Sonic Comments

To Pad or Not to Pad the Room—That Is the Question

Without any added acoustic absorption via my acoustic foam pads, there is a little too much listening room slap echo on announcers’ voices, but they really sound very good indeed without any foam room treatment. I think listeners who never listen to internet radio, or who could care less about the apparent acoustic surrounding a radio announcer’s voice could be very happy with the way the Larsens sound in my room without any acoustic foam at all. This no-foam listening condition certainly maximizes the openness, size, and “liveness” of the presentation.

With my usual complement of 2-foot by 4-foot by 4-inch-thick acoustic foam pads (16 on the walls, 2 on the floor), the Larsens sound rather "closed down" by comparison to no pads. By “closed down” I mean less live, less open, and somewhat smaller in their overall presentation.

I spent considerable time and effort working to figure out which foam pads were needed to suppress the slap echo without getting too much of the "closed down" effect. This was somewhat of a balancing act, but in the end I think I’ve found an excellent compromise.

Using the Clap Track, track 4 on the Sheffield/XLO Test CD and my small flat mirror taped to the wall, I determined that the slap echo was coming from the areas of the side walls which, from the listening seat, were reflecting the tweeter/mid-bass driver from the far speaker, not the nearer one. Because of the way the drivers are angled when the speakers are positioned, as recommended, parallel and as close as possible to the wall behind them, the nearer speaker's drivers are invisible at any reflection point from the side walls. Thus, adding foam panels to catch the reflection of the near speaker did basically nothing to reduce the slap echo.

In contrast, the far speaker's drivers aim more or less toward the reflection areas of the far side wall. The idea is that those reflections are late enough not to interfere with imaging. That seems generally to be so and may be totally so in a room larger than mine. REG, for example, mounted the Larsen 9 speakers he reviewed against a 27-foot long wall. My “long” wall, at only 161 5/8” or just under 13.5 feet long, is only half that long. But since I intensely dislike slap echo on centered voices, such as radio DJs who you know are speaking in a totally dead studio environment, in my small room I needed to damp these sidewall reflections of the far speakers.

To do this I needed four pieces of 2’ x 4’ foam, two pads stacked floor to ceiling against each side wall. A single 2’ x 4’ piece of foam on each side wall was almost enough to satisfy me, but the upper foam pieces removed the remaining bit of “zing” slap echo sound.

I also do not need the floor pads. The rug seems to do an adequate job down there. I hear no difference covering the floor reflection areas with foam. This makes sense since, again because of the way the drivers are mounted and angled, there are no spots on the floor where I can see the tweeter or mid-bass driver reflected in my flat mirror placed on the floor.

One definitely should not damp the ceiling reflections with acoustic foam with the Larsen speakers. Intentional ceiling reflections of the higher frequencies are integral to the design of these speakers, helping to produce the appealing “liveness” of their sound by keeping the frequency response very even at all vertical and horizontal angles throughout the room up to the top octave. See figures 5 and 6 at this link from the Stereophile measurements of the Larsen 8. The main tweeter and mid-woofer are angled up by 45 degrees and the two auxiliary tweeters in each speaker are aimed straight up at the ceiling.

Padding the wall behind me, the window wall, didn’t do much in terms of the slap echo. But in the end I decided to use two pieces of the acoustic foam back there positioned side by side, not floor to ceiling. They give me more stable and focused images, especially in the center. Some may not need or even like such a focused imaging effect, but at this point I've not yet overcome my addiction to this perhaps unnatural image focus that has been so easy to achieve via foam padding of the walls with other speakers in the traditional fire-the-speakers-down-the-length-of-the-room orientation. Adding two more pads to deaden this area floor to ceiling did not further affect the imaging and only tended to “close down” the sound in an unneeded and unwanted manner.

 

[tmallin]

Comparison with the AR-303a

Sonically, the Larsens are an interesting contrast to the AR-303a’s and all other speakers I've owned. As REG's review states over and over, these sound not like speakers but more like music is just happening live through an open window in your wall. I would elaborate that sometimes there is not much depth or expanse to that image through the window--it's small and rather two dimensional, as if from a distance, and less "interesting." But with "better" recordings, the image can be vast and quite 3-D, with all sorts of in-between levels of depth and left/right expansiveness, as well as wrap-around envelopment. But the music is just "there," whatever the contours of its presentation. There is less of a sense that the music is coming from the speaker locations than I've ever before experienced. The spatial characteristics of recordings vary more with the Larsens than with any other speakers in my experience. The ARs usually have more of an “automatic” depth to their staging, but not nearly the staging gradations the Larsens reveal. All this is especially so with closed-eye listening.

The Larsens share with the ARs the lack of high frequency aggression on most anything. The Larsens have less warmth to the entire low end, but don't sound thin at all. The Larsen bass, as REG's review says, is more defined, more realistic than I've heard before. The ARs are certainly their equal and probably superior in low-end power but the Larsen's convey much more information about bass textures and images. In the midrange, once the 650 Hz peak is equalized out manually or automatically via Room Perfect, the Larsens seem at least equally adept at conveying the honest tone quality of instruments. In the top octaves I'd say the Larsens are rolled off a bit in much the same way as the ARs, which is to say both sound quite pleasant and non-aggressive up there.

I have not tried placing the AR-303a’s flat against the wall behind them. Vintage ARs (like the 3a) were meant to be used that way, though, and I know from experience they work nicely in such a set up. Many, if not most, vintage speakers were designed to be placed near the wall behind them. In addition to the ARs, I know from both experience and memory that this includes the vintage models from KLH, EPI, Rectilinear, Advent, Klipsch Heritage, and early Snell models. However, none of these speakers dealt with the problem of room reflections in any significant way. The against-the-wall positioning was mostly part of getting the designed bass balance correct. Away from the wall, these designs tended to sound at least a bit anemic in the lower frequencies. The Larsens are unique to my experience in the degree to which their design attempts to avoid producing early room reflections and their designed attention to this problem is easily and almost immediately quite audible.

Yes, I think that the Larsen 9s sound better than the AR-303a, but the AR remains my second favorite and the gap is not nearly so huge as the price difference. The AR-303a is a 30-year-old design and available only used. When they are offered for sale, the asking price tends to be just over $1,000 a pair. The Larsen 9 is at least as rare on the used market as the AR-303a, probably more so, and the asking price is usually over $6,000 a pair.

I believe that the Larsen 9 currently is available from the manufacturer new. I'm not totally up to date on the manufacturing situation at Larsen. I know that for a while after the death of founder John Larsen the company's website did say that production had ceased. But that message was later pulled from the website.

Then in an email to me dated June 18, Michael Vamos of USA Larsen distributor Audio Skies told me:

The Larsen 9 are 16K or more depending on finish.

Shipping would be around $600 extra.

There is quite a wait on Larsen 9 right now. If you need them fast we can sell you a demo pair right away. Or it would be 4-5 months, depending on finish. Cheapest finish is maple, Ebony would be the fastest.

I later learned that some USA Larsen dealers may have the Larsen 9 in stock or at least have a demo pair for audition and quick sale.

Just before publishing this I learned the current pricing situation on the new .2 versions of the Larsen 8 and 9, not yet discussed on the Larsen website. The USA price increases are significant. The 8.2’s are now $8,900; the 9.2’s are $18,000 in maple; $19,500 in ebony, walnut, white or golden maple.

Only you can decide whether the price difference is worth the quality increment. If you have a chance to hear the Larsen 9, or any of the speakers currently offered by Larsen, you should do so, not do as I did and buy them blindly. As REG said in his review:

Whether their unique sound is for you is something you need to experience for yourself. You will have not heard anything else much like the sound—except of course in live music.

 

[tmallin]

Room Sound

As I understand the comments by REG in his TAS reviews of the Larsen 9 and 8, it’s not so much the flatness of the response of the Larsens that is remarkable, but the flatness of the room response and lack of reflections from nearby surfaces via its unusual design. He has struggled to describe the sound of the speakers, as do I. He basically just says that they sound more like live music than other speakers. That is as good a description as any, I think. This is, as he says, almost instantly audible as a difference, and not only a difference, but better than other speakers in this respect. Hearing this lack of your own room’s sonic signature is startling and induces feelings of realism, despite any minor frequency response abberations, such as the 650 Hz peak he mentions.

The Larsens have the widest sweet spot I've ever experienced. Even with drivers only about 7 feet from my ears, I can lean quite far to either side and centered images stay centered without any phasey sensations as I move. And in walking around the room, and even outside the room seated down the hall at my computer desk, the sound seems well-balanced. Well, at my computer desk the bass is way down in level, but that's been so with all the speakers I’ve ever had in this room and is helpful since the bass does not intrude so much in other areas of the house, upstairs where the system is or downstairs where my wife usually is.

Also, I agree that in terms of the effect on frequency response, “the usual floor bounce” in the power range of the upper bass (100 Hz to around 300 Hz) can be much more deleterious to accurate musical reproduction than most audiophiles appreciate. If unaddressed, “the usual floor bounce” can really diminish the level of important musical tones in this region--say the cellos or even bass voices. Orchestras and all other music can sound anemic, less powerful, and lacking in grandeur and gravitas. Your expensive high-end system can sound like a toy unless you eliminate “the usual floor dip.”

Unfortunately, in a small room like mine, using thick foam on the floor to absorb more of the floor-bounce and thus reduce cancellation effects down into the upper bass is impractical because the foam creates a trip hazard and/or it can easily be damaged by stepping on it accidentally. In a small room like mine, the reflection area for the floor reflection is usually very close to the listening chair, at least if you like to listen in the near-ish field, say six or less feet away, as I usually do with ordinary speakers.

While I have lived with floor pads in my room with my AR speakers and some others, it is not fun. There is little room for my feet when sitting or getting in or out of the chair. I must be very careful not to trip, not to damage the foam, and not to move the foam. I mark all four corners of each floor pad with masking tape attached to the carpet since I know that despite being careful, I WILL occasionally move one or both floor pads with my feet.

One reason padding the floor (other than with carpet) is not necessary with the Larsen 9 (or other Larsen speakers, I think) is that the unusual design mounts the upper range drivers atop the cabinet in such a way that there is no area on the floor where the tweeter or bass/midrange drivers mounted atop the cabinet may be seen from the listening position reflected from a flat mirror placed on the floor. The bass cabinet entirely blocks the view of the upper drivers from a mirror on the floor. This is the only speaker I've owned where this is true. In addition, the low bass driver (producing only sound below 300 Hz) is mounted very near the floor so floor bounce from that driver is not an issue.

One reason the Larson 9 and other Larsen speakers ignore side wall reflections is that, also due to the unusual cabinet design and driver mounting of the upper drivers, there are no areas on the near side walls where those drivers of the near speaker may be seen from the listening seat reflected in a flat mirror mounted on the near side wall. Only the far speaker's reflection may be seen and that speaker is, of course, much farther from that sidewall, making that reflection much later in time and thus less sonically obnoxious, even in a small room.

You can use room treatment, plus toe-in, plus near-ish field listening to pursue the goal of minimizing your second venue/listening room acoustics colorations. But it strikes me that the Larsens go further than you can practically go with room treatment when using ordinary box speakers. Even from the near-ish field, with speakers aimed at my ears and lots of absorption on the room surfaces, with ordinary speakers I still hear something which sounds far more contaminated by my listening room acoustics than with the Larsens and relatively little room treatment, listening further back from the speakers and with no toe-in of the cabinets.

 

[tmallin]

The Effect of Room Perfect

As usual, for implementing Room Perfect, contrary to Lyngdorf’s instructions, I did not move the mike. I placed the microphone capsule at the spot where the middle of my head between my ears would be when I sit in the listening chair. Then I just aimed the measuring microphone straight ahead at the point midway between the two speakers. I did five rounds of the test tones that way. Unusually for my neighborhood, no trains, planes, or loud autos intruded the whole time I ran the test tones.

After running Room Perfect I spent a couple of hours listening, going back and forth between the Bypass and Focus Room Perfect options.

As with the AR-303a’s, Room Perfect made a few subtle all-to-the-good changes which, taken together, seem quite significant in nudging the sound toward perfection:

The deep bass, is, as I hoped, much stronger now and the range above that up through the lower midrange is a bit warmer.

The 650 Hz bump-up is now conspicuous in its absence. I really wasn't much aware of it before, but I now hear that Room Perfect has eliminated a bit of midrange forwardness/honkyness and voices especially sound yet more natural. Comparing the sound of pink noise (I use 2 Hours of Pink Noise via YouTube) with Room Perfect in the Focus position versus the Bypass position in a quick A/B makes the Bypass coloration quite obvious.

The imaging is yet more stable and focused. Image focus isn't a huge strength of the Larsens' presentation and Larsen and reviewers admit this, claiming that most speakers image more precisely than in real music, which is true, I think. But for those who appreciate a bit more image focus, it's there now.

The staging has also improved in depth, expansive width, and wrap around envelopment. For such small speakers, the presentations sounded "big" before on better recordings. Now it sounds yet bigger.

Residual distortion on centered voices like radio announcers seems gone and their voices seem tonally more accurate. I think removing the 650 Hz bump is at least partly responsible for this effect.

With the removal of the 650 Hz bump and whatever minor changes Room Perfect made above that frequency, together with the increased warmth below, the whole presentation is yet more relaxed and inviting. As before, there is no over-brightness anywhere in the mids or highs, but just a bit more of that smooth, relaxed quality now.

I'm VERY pleased. Like the ARs, these are just SO easy to listen to, but also more exciting to listen to.

 

[tmallin]

Choral Music

In my early listening I’ve noticed another particular excellence of the Larsen 9s not mentioned by the published reviews. That is their, in my experience, uniquely excellent portrayal of choral music. Making orchestras sound realistic is one thing. Making massed human voices at once sound like individual voices yet singing in ensemble—as they sound live—is quite another. Most speakers tend to make at least a bit of a mush with choral music. You either can’t hear the individual voices very well and get an overall wash of ensemble sound, or a few individual voices stick out so much that the ensemble nature of the singing is compromised. There is also a layer of gritty high frequency distortion which most often is irreducible. This is so common that we more or less accept this sort of choral reproduction.

Not so with the Larsen 9. On simply miked recordings of choral ensembles individual voices can be heard just fine, but the ensemble effect is beautifully present and intact. Any distortion is stripped away. This excellence is quite apparent even on low-resolution sources such as internet radio. Try the Choral Stream from Your Classical, which regularly presents simply miked recordings of various fine choral ensembles. I suspect that this choral music excellence primarily has to do with the absence of early listening room reflections in the mid and high frequencies. But, whatever the cause, lovers of choral music will find something truly special awaits with the Larsen 9s.

 

[tmallin]

What About Dipoles?

Dipole radiating speakers are often discussed as a solution to the room reflection problems in the listening room. That is because dipoles put out about 5 dB less energy in the directions of each of their edges compared to box speakers: 5 dB less up, down, and to the sides. Thus, theoretically, they neither activate floor-to-ceiling or side-to-side bass modes as much as omnidirectional bass box speakers nor reflect nearly as much sound from floor, ceiling, or side walls as speakers with front-facing boxed drivers.

However, in my considerable experience using dipole speakers in small listening rooms, the theoretical advantages are not borne out in practice, at least with respect to early reflections from room surfaces. Here is what I believe to be the weak point about dipoles as used in real rooms as far as avoiding room surface reflections goes:

The SPL from a dipole speaker must be projected in some direction. Since less goes to the sides and toward floor and ceiling, more must go out the back and out the front.

Unlike a box speaker, there is no stuffing or cabinet walls to absorb the rear emission of mids and highs. Also, if the dipole is a largish flat panel, the speaker will tend to beam intensely in the mids and highs. While speakers like the Pure Audio Project with dynamic drivers beam less, that just means that such speakers are also not limiting their dispersion to the sides and up and down as much as flat panel dipoles do, resulting in more interaction of the speaker's output with sidewall, floor, and ceiling room boundaries than with flat panels. Yes, there is still some wrap-around dipole cancellation, but it is not as effective as with flat panel dipoles since the wider dispersion of smaller dynamic drivers does not limit the amount of off-axis radiation the way a large flat panel does. The edge cancellation from a dipole is about 5 dB. With a large flat panel the edge radiation is probably at least another 5 or 10 dB down due to beaming, whereas the dynamic drivers are not that beamy.

Since most dipoles tend to beam more than box speakers, you must toe dipoles in somewhat to get flat response in the upper mids and highs at the listening position. But this means that the full-range rear radiation WILL interact not only with the wall behind the speakers, but also with the side walls in the area behind the speakers. Also, their full-range reflections off the wall behind the listener will be concentrated and thus stronger than with box speakers. This means that these areas of the listening room need more damping than with ordinary box speakers. If undamped, these "laser beam" reflections ricochet off the walls. While some of these reflections may be later in time getting to the listener than with box speakers, they are more intense and cause more slap echo, in my experience, than box speakers. Any studio announcer's voice or the clap track I’ve referenced will immediately show this. Again, this must be damped unless you want to hear a constant overlay of your listening room's reflections on the recorded music. In a small room, my experience with the Sanders 10c and 10e showed that I needed a lot of 4-inch foam covering the side walls behind the speakers as well as the back wall behind the speakers, plus a lot of foam on the wall behind the listening position, to damp the ricocheting mids and highs.

Thus, in my experience, I needed at least as much foam to get rid of obnoxious room reflections from large flat panel dipoles as I needed with box speakers. The foam was just distributed around the room surfaces in a different pattern.

I am perfectly willing to admit that what I say about dipoles may only apply to small listening rooms. I try to always qualify what I say about the sound of speakers by mentioning the size of my room. I sometimes think I mention my room size too often in the course of discussing speakers. For the record here again, my room is rectangular, 161 5/8 inches long (a bit less than 13.5 feet), by 132 inches (11 feet) wide, by 103.5 inches (a bit more than 8.5 feet) high.

Do you have a "small listening room" with the type of problems I'm talking about? If when listening to radio station announcers they don't sound like they are speaking from a large room, or when playing track 4 of this Sheffield/XLO Test Disc (the Clap Track) you do not hear a "zinggggg" sound trailing each clap, you have a set up in which you have negligible mid and high frequency slap echo and don't need to worry about that issue. You either have a large enough room, or a room damped well enough that this slap echo is not a problem for your set up.

Compare the sound of each of these sources (radio announcers and clap track) played back through your speakers to the way they sound listening via any headphones. Via headphones the announcers will sound like they are talking from a small, well-damped room 99% of the time, and the claps on the Clap Track will have absolutely no trailing sound, "zinggggg" or otherwise. You can thus be sure that, to the extent either of these effects (large room sound from radio announcers or trailing sound on each clap) is heard via your speakers, that is sound constantly generated by your listening room and overlaid on everything you listen to, not sound contained on the recordings you are playing.

In my current small audio room, it usually takes considerable room dampening with soft acoustical treatment like thick acoustic foam to get rid of this slap echo, much less with the Larsen 9 speakers. With most speakers, dipole or box, I've needed about 144 square feet of such foam (sixteen 2-foot x 4-foot panels to damp the walls, two more to damp the floor reflections, for a total of 18 such panels). With the Larsen 9s, at most six of these panels (48 square feet) against the walls are needed to reach this result, none on the floor. Again, in my small audio room, the same amount of such foam is needed to reach this result with dipole panel speakers as with box speakers, the foam is just distributed differently along the walls with dipoles. The Larsen 9 speakers are the sole exception to this experience with the speakers I've had in my room.

Some experts say that dipoles need to be at least five at a bare minimum and preferably seven or more feet from the wall behind them to "work ideally."

What does "work ideally" mean? It means precisely that in a room large enough that such a dipole set-up is physically practical, the reflections off the walls will be late enough in time not be interpreted by the ear/brain as part of the direct sound and thus distortion of the direct sound. Instead, the reflections will create an audibly separable reverberation or ambiance that may be subjectively pleasing or sweetening to the usually inadequate original hall reverb encoded in the recording itself. Or so the theory goes.

Regardless of how pleasing this larger-listening-room ambiance may be, it, too, is distortion since it is NOT part of the original spatial characteristics of the recording. The radio announcer test and the clap track test will show the degree to which this second-venue-listening-room-created-ambiance is audible in your listening room.

You will have to decide for yourself whether this constant reverberant overlay on the sound you hear from your system in your listening room sounds "good" to you. I certainly agree that in a larger room than mine there is a better chance that more listeners will interpret it as "sweetening" or other enhancement of your system sound. But it's not like this trailing echo/reverb/ambience sound just magically goes away with increasing room size. It just changes in character. To get rid of it or lessen it, you need adequate absorption and/or diffusion in your listening room, either via furnishings, or intentional acoustic room treatments, or a combination of both.

My wife and I recently saw the movie, "Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale" in the largest movie theater in our area, an art-deco masterpiece of design, capable of seating 1,200 people on the main floor. This theater has a huge screen and wonderful digital image projection, but it has an issue with the sound. There is too much reverb even from fairly close seats to make dialog sound natural. Granted that dialog in the large rooms of Downton Abbey would have more reverb attached than in a small dometic room we are all accustomed to, but this reverb was attached to all dialog, even when people were talking outdoors. The English accents contributed to making the dialog more difficult to follow for us USA viewers. Even without my prompting, after the movie my wife complained about there being too much large-room-reverb attached to all the sound.

 

[tmallin]

Caveats & Rejoinders

If you really like to constantly have a lot of depth to the presentation, the Larsens may not satisfy you. However, when you close your eyes, on a lot of the better recordings there is a very realistic presentation of stage depth with the Larsens.

Also, if you like to hear a lot of shimmer and air on cymbal sounds, the Larsens may not be the best for you. You could try bumping up the top octave or two with equalization—seasoning to taste, in other words. I have not tried that, but it would probably work, perhaps at the cost of making the speakers more sensitive to the usually too aggressive high frequency balance of a lot of commercial recordings.

Other speakers I’ve recently used in this room—such as the AR-303a, Graham LS8/1, and Watkins Generation 4—when set up in the usual firing-down-the-length-of-the-room orientation, toed in, with near-ish field listening and with lots of room padding--have more obvious depth of field than any speaker, including the Larsen 9, set directly against the wall, firing across the room.

However, the Larsens have much more apparent detachment of the sound from the speakers and much more width of stage. This can make the presentation larger in a small room. And in closed eye listening, the Larsen depth of field is very realistic.

Also, as I’ve said, the Larsens’ presentation just sounds more like real music in a large room than the ordinary set up of other speakers. The overall Larsen presentation sounds convincingly real in a way I’ve never heard from other speaker set-ups.

One other major consideration is whether your listening room can easily accommodate the Larsen speakers. The manufacturer and reviewers stress that they MUST be set up along one of the long walls of your listening room, with the speakers as close as possible to the wall behind them, at most three inches from that long wall. Most systems are set up along the short wall with the speakers placed far into the room. While placing the speakers along a wall will tend to physically and visually open up a room, sometimes moving things around may prove difficult for various reasons. You need to assess your situation BEFORE committing to a Larsen speaker purchase. In my case only one of the two long walls was suitable in terms of getting the speakers really close to that wall, but with that wall all I really needed to alter, system-wise, was to get speaker cables twice as long. Even that accommodation might seem anathema to some audiophiles, however.

Finally, consider the price. While I find the Larsen 9 to be overall sonically superior to the AR-303a I was just using in the same room, I'm not sure whether it is worth the comparative price difference even used. The AR can usually be found for asking prices just over $1,000 whereas I paid six times that much for the used Larsen 9 and now the new 9.2 versions are 18 or 19 times as much. Plus, new Larsens may take months to get. I know about diminishing returns, but that's a huge difference considering that the ARs are still my second favorite of all time overall. And the AR-303a's, while pretty rare used, are still easier to find used than the Larsen 9s.

 

[tmallin]

Preparing for the Purchase

As the next to last paragraph of the preceding post indicates, acquiring Larsen speakers is not just one of mere substitution of one pair of speakers for another placed similarly. No, you must consider whether your room can physically accommodate the Larsen set up, then plan how you are going to accomplish such a set-up, and further consider whether the effort is worth the plan.

In my case, the first step was to realize I needed to do something about my again growing “stereo graveyard” of retired speakers. In my former house, more than fifteen years ago, at one time I had upwards of ten pairs of retired speakers in my stereo graveyard. I also had seven active stereo systems in the house. I had a huge basement, part of it unfinished, which provided adequate space to accommodate the relics of once cherished music reproducers, both speakers and electronics. While I told myself that I might rotate some of these Golden Oldies back into my primary system, that never happened, and I finally realized it was never going to happen. I always opted for new (or at least new to me) speakers and other equipment instead. Thus, I began to sell off the items in my stereo graveyard. The need to sell my former home in 2010 accelerated this process. I knew my new home could accommodate at most two active stereo systems. Still, I brought a few extra pairs of speakers (e.g., AR-3a) to the new house, keeping them along the sides of my current audio room for a while until I was willing to part with those as well.

All was well until the last couple of years when I again started to accumulate extra speakers. Before the Larsen purchase I had pairs of the Graham LS8/1, Watkins, Generation 4, and Dynaco A25 speakers in addition to the two active pairs of AR-303a speakers in my two systems. Once I figured out how to reconfigure my listening room to accommodate the Larsen 9s and committed to the physical process of doing that, I set about reducing my speaker inventory. I knew I didn’t want to sell the ARs, but I needed a place to store them. This prompted quick (as in one or two days quick) local sales of the Graham, Watkins, and Dynacos to lucky ecstatic buyers. I didn’t give them away, but let’s just say that the sale prices were extreme bargains.

 

[tmallin]

Preparing the Room for the Larsen 9s

Because my house has hot water baseboard heat, the heat registers stick out three or four inches from the bottom of some walls. This would prevent me from getting the Larsen speakers within the required three inches of the wall behind them on one of the long walls of my audio room. The other long wall was fine, however.

I uninstalled the AR-303a speakers, their stands and cables, and stored them in the back of the large closet in my audio room. I moved the listening chair out of the room. That was all the furniture that was atop my oriental-style rug in the audio room. I then mostly rolled up the rug toward my audio rack, leaving the rubber carpet pad in place, and moved the rug so that its edge was as close as possible to my audio rack while remaining centered on the short dimension of the room. This better centered the rug on the room’s long dimension. I wanted the rug as centered as reasonably possible along the room’s long dimension so as to provide roughly equal rug floor coverage for both the left and right Larsen speakers if they were symmetrically positioned along the long wall as I planned to place them. The Larsens rely on the rug to eliminate any vestiges of floor surface reflection. The last step in repositioning the rug was to trim off a couple of inches of now-exposed foam rubber padding. This whole rug repositioning process went much more smoothly than I anticipated, taking at most a half hour after removing the furniture.

I did not want to move the equipment rack from its centered-on-the-short-wall position or move it closer to the wall behind it to allow exact centering of the rug along the room’s long dimension. To do so would have made the already tight area behind the rack too close to the wall to allow for even moderately easy access to the jacks and cables on the back of the equipment.

Moving the other furniture around was simple and again took less than half an hour. I left the bookcase filled with my audio magazines in the same place. I rolled up the closet end of the carpet and its pad a bit and then slid the two CD racks into their new positions. The CD rack which had been next to the bookcase was slid straight down the window wall to the other corner of the long wall and short wall. The CD rack which had been next to the entry door slid across the closet wall to its new position where the other CD rack had been, between the window and the bookcase. The CD racks are incredibly sturdy, being solid cherry with lots of big bolts holding things together and little vinyl pads for the floor interface. After Swiffering and vacuuming around the edge of the rug to remove any grit which might scratch the floor, I just slid them along the edge of the bare wood floor around the carpet with the racks fully loaded with CDs.

Once I had the Larsen speakers in place, I realized that, for visual aesthetic reasons, I had to touch up the blue paint on the wall behind the speakers to fix some coverage problems with the blue paint that previously had been hidden by acoustic foam pads positioned for my prior set-ups. I also had to paint the white electrical outlet and receptacle between the speakers which had been hidden before by a CD rack. It stuck out like a sore thumb. I painted those the same blue as the wall. Now my sensibilities are no longer offended. Rather than remove that outlet and cover the hole with a blue-painted blank plate, I painted both the outlet and its plate blue and that works fine aesthetically. I’m not bothered by the white wall switch higher up and above the left speaker, probably because it is nowhere near the center of the audio soundstage and because of its nearness to the white door trim and white door itself.

I also had to work on my night lights for night-time listening. The two 4-watters I was using before worked perfectly with the speakers arranged the other way, firing down the room. But with this firing-across orientation, there was a lack of uniform lighting of the wall I look at in eyes-open listening, plus some shadows, and that bothered me.

I solved the night lighting problem by removing one of the night lights and upping the wattage on the other from 4 to 7 watts (incandescent bulbs). I also moved the light and its black vinyl 8.5" x 11" cover sheet closer to the right back corner, arranging the cover to throw most of the light into that corner of the room where that brighter spray of light is hidden by a CD rack. Now I don't see that night light in my field of vision while facing the speakers and the wall behind the speakers has a nice dim, fairly uniform wash of light on the whole thing, just bright enough for me to see what I'm doing for maneuvering around the room and to visually "see" the imaging and staging during eyes-open listening without calling attention to the positions of the speakers themselves. But if I hold the Lyngdorf remote up and angle its face toward the right back corner of the room, there is just enough light to see the buttons and know which preset to push without relying strictly on touch

 

[tmallin]

Purchasing the Larsen 9 Speakers

I bought my used pair of Larsen 9 speakers in ebony finish from The Music Room (TMR). The transaction proceeded very smoothly. Shipping was very fast, the packaging was bombproof, and the delivery was accomplished as promised. In addition, the speakers looked to be in even better condition than the pictures indicated.

If the listing is still up, which it is at this writing, you can see very high resolution pictures of the pair I bought from all angles. These pictures are so detailed and unflattering that to my eyes in my room lighting, some of the flaws I can see in the pictures are either invisible or much less noticeable. In any event, these are the best pictures you will see of the Larsen 9 speakers anywhere on the internet and show details of the construction you have to guess at from other pictures and descriptions.

I paid for inside delivery so FedEx even took the boxes off the palette TMR used to ship them and carried the boxes upstairs for me to my audio room.

As noted, the speakers look in better shape than TMR's pictures make them appear. The mar on the front of one just below the Larsen badge was not as noticeable in my light as in the pictures, same for the other defects. For the life of me I cannot see the supposedly missing veneer chip in the corner shown in a close up. I covered up the mar near the badge with a single swipe of a Minwax furniture marker, then wiped it with a damp cloth to get rid of the bit-too-dark pigment I gave it. Now that mar is basically invisible from more than a foot away. While the speakers don't look flawlessly new close up, they are far closer to new looking than the ARs I had in this room and those looked just fine unless I looked at them from close up in daylight with the window blinds fully open. The ebony finish on these is basically perfect now that I fixed that one mar near the badge; I cannot see the little swirly defect on the corner of one shown in TMR's photos.

Taking a step back, the speakers look gorgeous overall. The construction is fascinating and cannot be fully appreciated from the 2-D images/videos online. My wife is really impressed and surprised at how good these look. They also look "tiny" for speakers which measure 12" wide by 15" deep by 36.5" tall (including the stock soft footers). These are basically the same size and footprint my AR-303a speakers would have on standard 12" AR stands, but the ARs look much more massive, probably since they are squared off, while these are rounded and have the cutaway at the top, as well as because the narrow 12" width dimension is basically what you tend to concentrate on, as opposed to the AR's 15" width dimension which fully faces the listener in the sweet spot. And I'm sure having them against the wall rather than in the middle of the room also helps make the Larsens appear smaller.

For the longer speaker cables I needed I purchased a 20-foot pair of Canare 4S11 star-quad cables with locking banana plug connections at both ends from Blue Jeans Cable. I’ve used this Canare cable in my systems non-stop for at least ten years now. I used Blue Jeans to order my Canare 4S11 cables rather than Benchmark, since Benchmark doesn't stock 20-footers, only 25. Benchmark told me that the 20-foot length would take months to get and cost extra. Besides that, I really didn't want the extra length.

Sonically, while the Benchmark version of Canare 4S11 gives the impression of greater sturdiness and cosmetic finishing, I’ve never noticed any sonic significant differences between the finished products of these two suppliers even though Benchmark charges about three times as much. Benchmark uses silver solder on its connections, while Blue Jeans is unique in using ultrasonic welding to make a direct, solderless connection between the wire and the banana plug. I treated the welded connections of the Blue Jeans with Caig Deoxit Gold for perhaps further sonic enhancement.

 

[tmallin]

The Larsen 9 Set-Up

Rack Placement

I should comment about having the rack on the side of the room instead of between the two speakers.

This is the first time I have NOT had my equipment rack centered between the two speakers in this room--10 years. I will point out, however, that the rack has never been placed in an area that is in front of the first reflection areas from the speakers from the wall behind the rack as viewed from the listening seat.

It used to be a rule of thumb to never put your equipment rack against the wall between the speakers, both because of possible sonic reflections and because that is usually an area for the worst bass vibrations from the music. These days, however, it seems most every system I see pictured has the rack mounted between the speakers. Visually, that's more "impressive" and audiophiles can rationalize that this keeps the cabling costs down, the room tidiness up, and may gain sonically from short cables what you lose from reflections and vibrations.

In my other yet smaller AV room, I have my other set of the AR-303a speakers positioned a few inches forward of my centered 42-inch Sony TV. Despite the presence of the TV in the center and surely in the reflection areas of sound from the speakers, I get amazing sound in that room from both TV and music with no imaging uncertainty and no high frequency nasties. So it could well be that having a rack in the middle might not be a sonic problem at all.

In my old house, I ALWAYS had my much larger, taller rack (an Arcici Suspense rack, if you remember those) off to the side, not in a corner, specifically placed so as to be both behind the listening position for less reflections off the rack toward my ears and away from the maximum bass areas near the room corners and along the wall behind the listening area.

In my current room, with my old set-ups with the speakers firing into the long dimension, there was no spot along either side wall where the rack would have been sufficiently physically and reflectionally out of the way of the speakers. That is why I put the outlets and the rack so as to be between the speakers in my prior set-ups. I got rid of the old tall Arcici rack. (I actually "lost" the crucial long threaded rods parts of it for more than a year after I moved and by the time I "found" those parts [the movers had bent around the edges inside a large wall painting box for which painting we had no room to display] I had discarded the rest of the Arcici Suspense rack.) I consciously kept my newer racks shorter so as to be less in the way of reflections from speaker rear and side radiation. First I had a 36-inch-high five shelf rack and then found ways to simplify the electronics so as to be able to fit all the audio electronics I needed in the room onto the current 20-inch-high rack.

In my current room, the dedicated circuit outlets for the audio equipment, as well as the ethernet wall plate are all hidden behind the foam pads you see to the left of the short equipment rack. It has always been so since that is a first reflection area for the near speakers in my prior set-ups and the first reflection area for the far speakers in this new set-up.

To put the rack along the long wall between the Larsen speakers would have shortened the required speaker cables to 8 to 10 feet, rather than the 20 footers I now need. But it also would have required extension cords for all the electrical connections and that would have been both visually messier (in the photos you can barely see the speaker cables running along the floor wall junction) and perhaps at least equally sonically detrimental compared to longer speaker cables.

Also, it would have been a lot more work moving things around. Thus the equipment rack stayed where it was, centered along what is now the right side wall as you face the speakers.

 

[tmallin]

Speaker Placement

Given the 36.5-inch height of the Larsen 9s atop their soft rubbery footers, I can sit in my listening chair without height enhancers under the cushion. This gets my ears to 37 inches above the carpet, just above the top of the Larsen cabinets and just above their upward and inward angled main tweeters.

Because no foam pads are needed on the floor, if I like, I have more than enough room to fully stretch out my legs sitting in the listening position. Without the floor pads I also don’t fear moving those pads accidentally, stepping on and thus damaging them, or tripping on them when getting into or out of the listening chair.

Before even purchasing the Larsens I had determined that placing them along the one workable long (161 5/8 inches) wall I could place them about 7 feet apart. Since I wished to keep the speaker placement symmetrical with respect to the length of that long wall, the limit to how far apart I could place them was constrained by the position of the room’s entry door which is near the end of that long wall. This 7-foot-apart speaker placement put the outside edge of the left speaker right up against the door frame of the entry door and the outside edge of each speaker about 38.5 inches from the nearest side wall. Larsen recommends a minimum distance of 50 centimeters, or about 20 inches from the near side wall.

With about 7 feet between the two speakers, for an equilateral triangle listening position with the speakers (recommended as the positional starting point in Larsen speaker manuals) this put my listening position about 6 feet or 72 inches back from the wall behind the speakers and 60 inches or five feet in front of the wall behind the listening position. Because my room is 132 inches in this front-to-back dimension, this listening position was thus 6/11 of the distance from the wall behind the speakers to the wall behind the listeners, a little more than halfway. I wanted to avoid listening from the front-to-back midpoint since, unavoidably seated symmetrically in the room right to left, that spot would have been the minima or null for all the length and width bass modes of the room.

In one way, set up for the Larsen 9 speakers is extremely easy. You don’t need to worry about toe-in angle at all. Just get the back walls of the speakers parallel to the wall behind them and you are done. You face the speakers straight out, with no toe in.

The circular foam rubbery disks the Larsen 9 uses as a floor interface will tend to slip out of their circular cutouts if you attempt to drag or slide the speakers across a carpeted or hardwood floor. I recommend getting the speakers into their approximate positions first and only then insert the disks in the cutouts on the speaker bottoms. Then carefully nudge the speakers into the exact positions you want them.

The one possible problem I anticipated in getting the Larsens positioned was getting them close enough to the wall behind them if I continued to use the locking banana plug connectors I favor and which I ordered for the speaker cables. I've been using such connectors for years. According to research done by Benchmark, after the pro-audio Speak-On connections which Benchmark amps provide and which Benchmark urges users to employ if possible, locking banana plugs provide the next best connection. According to Benchmark, of the usual choices (bare wire, tinned wire, pins, spades, rings, ordinary banana plugs, locking banana plugs, and Speak-Ons) only Speak-Ons and locking banana plugs reliably pass high current with low distortion.

Without adaptors, Speak-On connections are not compatible with either the Larsen speakers or my Lyngdorf TDAI-3400 amp. The problem is that locking banana plug connectors stick out so far from even the angled connections on the back that I thought it may be difficult to get the backs of the speakers within three inches of the wall behind the speakers as required by the design. Even using adaptors, the bulky Speak-On connectors would have been worse in this respect. Ordinary very flexible lamp cord wires with bare or tinned ends would be the best in terms of getting the speakers maximally close to the wall.

As to the required proximity to the wall behind the Larsen speakers, see this from Stereophile’s review of the Larsen 8:

The Larsen 8's setup instructions urge the user to keep the backs of the enclosures within 3" of the wall behind them, without actually touching that wall....

In my 19' by 12' listening room ... the speakers' bass output relative to the rest of the audioband was most realistic and enjoyable with the cabinets as close to the wall as possible—in my case, just over 1" away. Near-wall installation of the Larsens is complicated by the fact the connectors on these biwirable speakers are located on the rear panel; although the connectors are angled to minimize interference between cables and wall, cables that are exceedingly thick and stiff and/or have stupid-big terminations should be avoided. For the same reasons, it seems that in-line banana plugs, such as I use, are to be preferred to spade lugs. In my first hours of listening to the Larsens, I noted that having the speakers even slightly more than 3" from the wall behind them diminished bass extension and quality.

Once I actually had the Larsens and attached my Blue Jeans Cable Canare 4S11 speaker cables with locking banana plugs to the Larsen binding posts, it turned out that I need not have worried. I was able to get the back of the cabinets parallel to and only 1 9/16 inches away from the wall behind the speakers. And this was without the wires or their connectors pressing against the wall or the speakers.

I experimented with a seat placed further back so my ears were at the 2/3 - 1/3 of the 132" dimension into which the speakers fire. That put my ears 88 inches from the wall behind the speakers and about 91.5" from the tweeters. The low bass was much stronger from that position and the whole low end was warmer, probably because the room modes are more activated at this position.

I also tried the 38% position (from the wall behind the listening spot). Like the 1/3 position, this position had added bass compared to the equilateral triangle position, but not as much as the 2/3 – 1/3 position. In the end, however, I returned to the equilateral position, knowingly sacrificing a bit of bass extension/warmth for the greater clarity and "more organized" and pulled apart sound, and "bigger" presentation of the equilateral triangle set-up. I also hoped that Room Perfect would add in the low bass I was missing at the unequalized equilateral triangle position and in that respect my hopes were fulfilled. Room Perfect provided great bass from the spot which also provided the best imaging and staging.

As I mentioned above, not only did the bass and warmth response increase as I moved the listening seat closer to the window wall behind me, but the spatial presentation on any given recording changed relative to the equilateral triangle position I started and ended with. Sitting further back made the space a more compact "balloon" shape (which some listeners might prefer) which seemed a bit obviously deeper and certainly obviously less wide than from closer up. The equilateral triangle position increases transparency of the window on the music, however, and reveals more clearly/precisely placed images both side to side and in depth, especially in closed-eyes listening.

 

[tmallin]

Unused Foam Storage

Since the Larsen 9 set up uses far less acoustic foam than my prior set-ups, I had to decide what to do with the unused foam batts. I quickly decided not to discard the extra foam. Who knows, I may need it someday with future more conventional speakers in this room and this acoustic foam would be expensive to replace. Thus I needed to store 12 pieces of acoustic foam which are each 2-feet by 4-feet by four inches thick. That is the equivalent of a solid block of acoustic foam 2-feet by 4-feet by 4-feet, some 32 cubic feet of acoustic foam.

As it turned out, if I arranged things just right, the large storage closet which takes up one whole short end of my audio room had just enough space in it to store not only my AR-303a speakers, their stands and cables, but also all the extra acoustic foam. I love it when a plan comes together!

Summing Up So Far

The Larsen 9 is my current favorite speaker. The AR-303a is my current second favorite speaker. To my ears, the perceived overall quality gap is significant, perhaps even substantial, but definitely not huge.

Only you can decide whether the price differential is worth the extra fidelity to you. As I’ve mentioned, used examples of the ARs are usually listed for just over $1,000 a pair while the Larsen 9 is usually listed used for over $6,000 a pair. For new Larsen 9 speakers, you are now looking at $18,000 or more and perhaps months of wait time.

Keep in mind, though, that unless you already have suitable acoustic foam room treatment, for the ARs you'd have to add the cost of that to tame the room reflections. whereas I doubt that such padding would really be necessary for many if not most listeners for the Larsens. Checking the current price of the acoustic foam I have, 6 boxes of that (3 sheets to a box) would cost almost $2,500, which is what I'd need to have 16 sheets for the walls and two for the floor. And that's cheap, I'm sure, compared with similar foam thickness covered with pretty fabric or on frames you can mount to the wall. Thus, the necessity for acoustic treatment to hear these other speakers at their best could even up the prices quite a bit.

For stand mounted speakers, you also would have to add the cost of stands, but that could be dirt cheap if you get lucky and find some plant stands or other small tables that happen to be the right size. Or you could spend upward of a few hundred dollars for custom-made speaker stands. The $50 small tables I used with the AR-303a’s would be perfect if I had the even minimal carpentry skills needed to cleanly cut two inches off each leg; in stock form I needed to build up my listening seat height to get my ears high enough. The same tables work perfectly in stock form in my other room for the ARs since the chair I have in there sits a couple inches higher; but that just-right-height comfortable chair costs over $2,000.

Note that if you haven’t yet found them, pictures of my Larsen 9 set-up are attached to the “Current System” link at the bottom of any of my posts here on WBF. That “Current System” link also has a written description of my current audio room system.

 

[tmallin]

What about those who claim that listening room reflections are needed because sound engineers assume that home listeners will be listening in rooms with some reflections and thus purposely don't include in the recording a good replica of the acoustic environment of the recording venue--or, in studio created recordings which had no actual recording venue, do not include sufficient artificial ambiance to establish a recorded sense of venue?

Yes, I've heard such claims. But, in my opinion, at least if you have a relatively small listening room as I do and have had all the decades of my involvement in home music listening, I just do not think that the relatively early reflections which dominate the listening room "ambiance" with conventional speakers are either pleasant to hear or contribute to a sense of a recording's authenticity. A small room's slap echo is not pretty and is easily distinguishable from large room reverberation which might contribute to feeling that the music is live in a venue other than your listening room.

And from what I can hear from modern studio recordings of non-classical music, many sound engineers are using techniques to add convincing artificial ambiance to their recordings. This is probably due to the prevalence of headphone and car listening which I'm sure is far more common these days than listening to a pair of speakers at home. Thus, to the extent that home loudspeakers can ignore the acoustics of a small home listening room, one is hearing more of what the sound engineers intended.

To my ears in my small listening room, the Larsens, set up as recommended by the manufacturer, reveal a "you are there" acoustic on classical music recordings to an extent unmatched by my best efforts with conventional spakers. I know what classical music sounds like live and unamplified in good venues. The Larsen 9s allow me to hear both the sound of this music and recording venue's ambiance in my listening room to an unprecedented extent.

Because the Larsens seem to reveal the recorded classical music and recording venue ambiance to an unprecedented degree, I also assume that with studio-created recordings which had no real recording venue, the Larsens are also allowing me to hear the sound of both the music and the artificial spatial effects created by the sound engineers to an unprecedented degree. No, I can't be sure of this, but it seems a reasonable assumption. The sound of studio-created recordings probably is usually judged by the sound engineers listening in the near-ish field with speakers aimed at their ears and in a room with substantial acoustic treatment so as to minimize the sound of the studio listening environment, or via headphones which of course totally eliminate the studio room sound. The sound creators are thus probably hearing the recorded artificial sound minimally contaminated by the sound of the studio room. Listening via the Larsen 9s at home adds a minimum of second venue listening room contamination, getting me closer to what the music creators heard when they finalized the sound of their creation.

 

[tmallin]

People often seem interested in how particular speakers sound when heard from outside the listening room. The Larsen 9s sound unusually good in this respect also. More than any other speakers I've had in my current audio room, when heard from down the hall outside the room while sitting at my computer desk typing this, with my back turned toward the door and the speakers facing away from the listening room's door, both voices (spoken and singing, solos and massed) and music sound more like "live in the next room" than any speakers I've had in my audio room.

As I earlier mentioned, yes, the bass level is way down, as it always is from music reproduction in this room heard from outside that room. But there is a special clarity and liveness to the sound, as well as a more pleasing sense of hearing the recorded ambiance, even though I obviously am not hearing much if anything of the top couple of octaves from this listening position.