Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems DSP 6k … am I wasting my time

I had this issue, in almost the same room/floor/room underneath situation with two sets of 6Ks. The first pair I actually sold as I couldn’t take the bass boom. A couple of years later I tried another pair and they worked like a charm in exactly the same room. None of it involved special footers, it was more to do with room placement (and possibly a maintenance matter on the speakers).

What is the LxWxH of the room and which way is the system oriented? In my case the speakers didn’t work across the width but were great down the length.

My initial thought is you have them way too close to the walls/corners. Try pulling them out considerably more into the room. You could try the 1/5th width/length placement to begin with. Don’t have the same distance from side walls to rear walls. I ended up almost feeling like the speakers were towering over the listening position, but the sound was great. Adjust the listening position too as this makes a big difference. If either you or the speakers are stirring in big peaks or nulls it’ll sound very unbalanced.

Try putting them around the other way in the room, if you are free to re-orient, sometimes this helps.

The other factor which may (I say again, may) have made a difference, is that the second pair I bought had just been serviced and the tweeters replaced with new.

The procedure I think you’re asking about is for service techs to adjust new tweeters, not for correcting the levels of treble/bass - you have the bass and treble controls in DSP for that.

Alastair,

I sent you a PM.

Cheers,
Steve M.

Yes, try tone controls to adjust the bass as I noted above. Apologies if this was not clear in my reply.

I suspect you are battling two challenges- the room as well as aging DSPs that probably need a recap. If not cost prohibitive, maybe you can have them re-capped and then try again in your room with all of the above placement suggestions taking into account? If you decide to sell them on, the re-cap service should make them more attractive to a buyer. Recapping the amp boards has solved muddy bass issues for me.

The DSP6000s are really wonderful speakers- without the recap, you might be limited by the aging capacitors.

Before you spend any money on anything, definitely get the basics right first.

You don't mention how much you've tried playing with room placement of the speakers and listening position, if at all. This is absolutely fundamental to decent sounding bass - the best speaker in the world can sound crap if it's badly placed, or the listener is. Do you know about standing waves/peaks/nulls in listening rooms? If not, the GIK Acoustics website has some instructional videos, etc. which are a good beginning. To get a feel for this, put on a track with a decent amount of bass and walk around the room - as you go, you'll hear the bass is significantly boomy and much stronger in certain places, and much weaker in others - you need to place the speakers and yourself in the optimal position that particular room can offer - everything else is a band-aid to fix the rest of what you can't solve by room placement.

You might also need some bass traps in the room, if you haven't already - these helped me, and many others, quite a lot. Don't rely in the first instance on room correction - even Bob Stuart said it can't make a bad room sound good, but can help make it sound less bad, to my mind, it's the cherry on top to get that last little bit of difference when you can't do any more within the constraints of the room and domestic living to fix the fundamentals.

If you haven't already had your 6Ks serviced, and tweeters replaced, you may need to do this, but definitely do the above first - it costs you nothing but time to move things around a bit!

Hi 3dit0r,
Thanks for your input and that of others.

Most of the bases have been covered, I had them recapped and the last available firmware update done by Steve (swpnt) of this parish so I'm confident they are probably in the best electrical shape they can be, bar upgrades to 24bit.and black tweeters.

I've placed the speakers a little closer together, and even though they are not in the corners strictly speaking 10'' from back wall and 3' from side walls, I have used the boundary setting, and the bass is less intrusive with that settings also have the bass cut by -2dB across the board.

I'm going to try some of the isolation feet before anything else, because if nothing else, it should make repositioning far easier, and perhaps for casual listening TV etc, up against the wall, and then slide them out for more critical listening sessions. There is a lot to like about the 6K's for sure, and I did have similar problems with my M100's,which makes me point to the room rather than the speakers.

as I have said before on this subject I use DSP55000's on a heavy carpet floor and have fitted round headed bolts instead of spikes. This allows me to move them to the perfect room position for my own serious listening which would be absolutely unacceptable for normal domestic harmony.

The round headed bolts, deep carpet and 13 stone weight of the speakers results in a stable setting and they do not rock in any way. For normal listening and domestic harmony they are normally about 20 inches from the back wall.

Rgds
Stuart

No doubt! 5500’s are heavy enough. What must 55000’s weigh??!