Considering CLX purchase - wife says yes

[Wildblue]

I just sent this to someone via private messaging, talking about my diagram above. I throw it out here for discussion.

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I build private theaters as a hobby, including sound isolation and rudimentary acoustical treatments. I had built a private theater out of bare stud walls in my previous house, and wrote about it every issue in Home Theater Builder Magazine. When I moved to my current home a couple years ago, my house just happened to come with the current theater, which is great, but it was not built with sound isolation or acoustic treatments. I'll rebuild it someday, but for now, there's a single thick black velvet theater drape that covers 100% of the front wall. On that diagram, 99" is from the front wall to the front edge of the riser. 118" is from the front wall to the front of the front middle seats. (add another 12" maybe to the listeners' heads) Each row curves in an arc a little bit, so the front end of the row is slightly closer to the screen, just 116". Not a huge difference.

I'm not sure about the width between the outside listeners, but I do certainly realize that they're "outside the sweet spot" as it is with my current speakers, and I'm anticipating that CLX's would actually narrow the sweet spot more. Matter of fact, when I first demo'd the CLX at the Seattle debut, there was a noticeable difference in mids/bass by just moving from the center sweet spot seat, to the seat immediately next to it. So I'm even wondering if the two seats in the middle of the front row would be a large compromise in the sweet spot, not being able to dial it in perfectly.

But in the end, I'm not worried about the extremity seats. They're there for group movie nights with people that are less discerning on fidelity, and I can keep the good seats for myself with private critical listening.

 

[JMAUSGP]

My experience with CLXs and I believe this has been mentioned with others who also have experience with CLXs is that they have a much larger sweet spot than typical ML ESLs. At least they were much bigger than my Summits.

I have mine setup with a single seat usually, but I have also setup three seats side by side and all three were in the sweet spot.

My room is about 22 by 13.5 feet with a 7 foot ceiling.

I have also done a 5 seat configuration and there were no complaints from the assembled listeners. 3 front and 2 in the second row.

Right off, I can see that you might try considering changing your current seating to 3 on front riser and 4 on the rear riser. At least in the drawing it looks like that would work. That would give you three perfect Sweat spot seats and probably 2 of the 4 in row two.

Secondly and hopefully TonePub will chime in, I think you can put your CLX closer to the Front wall and screen than 4 feet. Especially if you are going to use them in a HT enviroment. In my upstairs HT I have my Stylos mounted to the wall on each side of the screen and they sound awesome for HT.

As for the center channel for HT it probably needs to be above and on plane with the screen. With a good AVR equalizer, like audyssey, the AVR will take care of equalizing the sound between Center and CLX Front channels.

And if you decide to have two setups, one HT and another Music only then you can have two AVR equalization setups as well.

There is a site called Herbies Audio Lab http://herbiesaudiolab.home.att.net/ At Herbies you can find decoupling gliders that would allow you to easily move your CLXs back and forth from a HT setup to a Music only set up. Just put tape markers on the floor. Herbies gliders are unusual in that they act similar to spikes and isolate the speaker from vibrations.

Actually there are lots of cool things at Herbies that a good sound system can use, but that is for another thread.

You know I think I can hear the crowd chanting......Jump...JUmp...JUMP...:devil:

 

[Wildblue]

Yeah, you guys are all very helpful, but I feel like I need an angel on my other shoulder, too, saying, "please... don't jump!"

Very interesting about the center channel. If I went with a ML Stage, then, you're thinking it's best to actually put it on the wall, not co-planar with ML L and R mains?

And curious... why would it be okay to push the mains closer to the wall for movies, but farther for music? Wouldn't they sound best for movies in the same spot as well?

(on another note, apparently Mt. Redoubt erupted a few hours ago there in Alaska, so my house is probably being covered by volcanic ash right now...)

 

[taylode]

Very interesting about the center channel. If I went with a ML Stage, then, you're thinking it's best to actually put it on the wall, not co-planar with ML L and R mains?
QUOTE]

I stated earlier that I wouldn't recommend putting your center on the wall. Yes your processor will compensate for the time differential but not the delta in your power requirements. We I build my new theater I will have all three in-line.

 

[JMAUSGP]

Last I heard, the wind was blowing the ash cloud away from Anchorage, hopefully that helps you.

As for moving the speakers closer to the wall during movies versus music.

I am not an expert, but the way it was explained to me is that the Movie is a 5.1 or 7.1 discreet channel source and the sound is mixed more for ambience and special effects action or motion on the Front R & L and the Side and Rear channels and that most of the sound comes from the Center Channel (almost all the dialog) except when you hear that wolf howling in the woods behind you, which is surround sound or where you live really could be a wolf.

And don't forget the Subwoofer with all the explosions and rocks coming down on your house.....oh wait that's Redoubt....I thought that would be strange if you are watching Bridges of Madison County.

Anyway, the subwoofer is really omni directional so it should not matter directionally where it is located and as long as the Center channel is located up front by the screen it should work directionally. Center and Subwoofer handle a disproportional amount of the sound in a movie, especially action movies like "Joe versus the Volcano".

Now with Music and critical listening, you have a soundstage to re-create and at times you have different instruments coming from different discrete channels, especially in SACD and DVD Audio 5.1 music sources that are mixed that way, like Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon, or Elton John Yellow Brick Road or Donald Fagen Morph the Cat to name but a few.

Or you may be partial to orchestral music or chamber music with all the soundstage and ambience of the venue thrown in. Or you may like just two Channel music or 2 channel SACD.

Regardless, with critical listening music the idea is to create a life like soundstage so directional sound is not enough. So unlike the movie source, you want to hear the distance between the drums and the guitar player, you want to hear/see/imagine the backup singers over behind and to the left of the front speakers and the feature singer is hovering out in front of you between the speakers and in front of the center channel.

To do this in a believalble way, the Logans have to be out away from the wall.

Anyway, the methods I described earlier would allow you to move your CLXs out away from the wall (Herbies Gliders) when you want to just do some critical music listening as opposed to the directional sound of a movie. Who knows maybe the movie setup will work good enough for your tastes, but maybe not.

Frankly if I lived next to a volcano, I would always be a bit nervous about creating too good of an HT demo, because when the real thing comes, some years in the future scientists would find you frozen in time, laughing at how cool your system could shake your whole house and knock the pictures off the wall

Seriously, get the CLXs and enjoy them before the Super Volcanos erupt and wipe certain places off the face of the earth.......or your wife changes her mind........Did I say that.....or was that surround sound?