This thread seems deja vu to me, RE: similar posts in the SMv3 teaser thread. Or is it the other way around?
Hey Ken, in your Show Us Your Gear post you refereed to your big speakers being in your Man Cave. Are they really in your living room set up?
One of the reasons I have my speakers set up in a square is I'm a bit fanatical with keeping arrival time as close as possible. I meticulously measure everything out and use a mic stand at audio epicenter with a T square & laser pointer to get the toe in exact on each speaker. In fact I have a string with a knot at the end attached to the mic stand & when all is positioned properly I can extend that string's knot & it will barely touch each mid-range as I circle it around the room. Arrival time is a funny thing... like phase relationships it's percent difference is dependent on frequency/wave length. So it's not going to be perfect, I just try to get it as close as I can. My Anthem has distance/delay settings in its menu for this but my first goal is get it set up as right as I can & try to avoid band aids.
After all my decades in audio & surround, where did this term
cogging evolve from? At any rate I guess it refers to speaker accentuation or holes in the middle of speaker pairs. In regards to the former, if an artist wants a screaming guitar to be in left front, by god that's where it should be. As for center side imaging it is not as good as center front but to me represents a rather extended range of sound front to back but still strongly off to the left or right. I can live with that in preference to rear speakers being more to the sides to reduce it. And interestingly when I do that 'ol Sansui Synth 270 deg pan around it moves quite smoothly around with out any jumping.
My main listening position is indeed in the middle with a folding chair that can easily be moved. The 2nd more casual position is on the couch right between the rear speakers. My set up looks like this:
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Not very fancy compared to other set ups on QQ but it's my Happy Place. Anyway, when sitting on the couch in the middle this position gives a very strong 180 deg soundfield with excellent left/right side imaging. So using real sound sources do work. But the front width now is quite contracted & there's nothing I can do about that. If you look to the very rear of the room there are 2 BIC speakers for my work station by the monitor. I have a switch that connects them to the rear speakers for a L-R and R-L decoding. I now have depth behind the couch & it sounds pretty darn good! As
@J. PUPSTER says we all have different set ups to make the most out of what we have to work with. And sometimes that means even with in the same room.